Amy Sohn, Author at JSTOR Daily

Amy Sohn

Amy Sohn is the author of five novels, including Prospect Park West and The Actress. She is writing a narrative non-fiction book for Farrar, Straus & Giroux and a television project for Vice. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Harper’s Bazaar, and other publications. She was born and raised in New York City.

Health

Charles Knowlton, the Father of American Birth Control

Decades after Charles Knowlton died, his book would be credited with the reversal of population growth in England and the popularization of contraception in the United States.

Health

Risqué and Radical: Benzion Liber’s X-Rated Yiddish Sex Guide

In 1915, Dr. Benzion Liber published a book that described good sex, pregnancy, childbirth, masturbation, sex education, and venereal diseases…in Yiddish.

Education & Society

The Star-Studded Life of Ms. Dorothy Bennett

The wacky life story of the astronomer, author, children's book publisher, and anthropologist who restored an old barge on the Gowanus Canal in 1937.

Editors' Picks

Education & Society

Teaching Happiness

According to one scholar, we're inundated with ways to pursue pleasure, which we conflate with happiness, to our own detriment.

Politics & History

Grave Robbing, Black Cemeteries, and the American Medical School

In the 19th century, students at American medical schools stole the corpses of recently-buried African Americans to be used for dissection.

Politics & History

Why Yemen Suffers in Silence

Yemen is suffering a major humanitarian crisis. How did the country get to such a precarious state, and why aren't Americans paying more attention?

Arts & Culture

When Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot Were Penpals

These 19th-century novelists might seem to have little in common. But for 11 years they wrote each other letters, forging an unusual literary friendship.

Education & Society

The Activist Students of 1960s East Los Angeles

Over a week and a half starting on March 1st, 1968, more than 10,000 students in mostly Chicano schools took part in what became known as the East Los Angeles School Blowouts.