Livia Gershon is a freelance writer in Nashua, New Hampshire. Her writing has appeared in publications including Salon, Aeon Magazine and the Good Men Project. Contact her on Twitter @liviagershon.
Frederick Hollick's case involved not only his controversial sex-positive arguments, but also the question of who should be privy to medical knowledge about sex.
In the Old West, cross-dressing was sometimes a disguise for criminals on the lam. But, one historian argues, in many cases these “cross-dressers” were probably people who we would identify as transgender today.
In 1874, popular writer Henry Hooper called the hotel clerk “the supercilious embodiment of Philistinism.” What accounts for the nineteenth century hate?
Sunday school was just one part of nineteenth century reformers’ efforts to improve children’s lives and morals in this period. But the mission of Sunday schools changed significantly over the years.
Today's teacher's strikes in places like Oklahoma and West Virginia are the result of labor battles back in 2010, and the declining presence of unions across the economy generally.
Dogs have always been a matter of debate in American cities. In 19th-century New York City, the debate involved paying impoverished children to participate in dog-murder.
Logger slang may have coined terms like "punk," "haywire," and "pie in the sky." One lexicographer attempted to catalogue the industry's slang in 1942.
More than a century ago, a blend of exotic stereotypes, trendy health advice, and new ideas about religion and gender built the foundations of the American yoga movement.
Anthropologist Elsa Davidson found at a Silicon Valley high school serving “at-risk” Latino and Southeast Asian kids that there are some complicated obstacles to careers in tech.
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.
Drug advertising is a longstanding issue in the U.S, tangled with patients’ rights to make their own decisions, doctors’ professional status, and the ethics of profiting from powerful drugs.
Visit your local public library today and you may find rows of kids playing computer games, or even a couple of Xboxes. Gaming at the library is a tradition that goes back to the 1850s.
After World War II, the United States was battling the Soviet Union for cultural influence. In divided Berlin, the tactics included lavish consumer goods exhibitions.
Looking at children’s wellbeing in rich countries like the U.S. in 2007, scholars found that inequality may matter a lot more for kids’ lives than absolute income level.
How the Memphis Sanitation Strike, with its iconic “I AM A MAN” signs, helped deepen Martin Luther King, Jr.'s radicalism in the last months of his life.
Menstruation is both a mundane fact of life and an oddly under-discussed subject. For many centuries, Western industrial societies have simply ignored it.
For most of American history, Washington's Birthday was a really big deal, but, as scholar Barry Schwartz explains, that's changed a lot since the middle of the twentieth century.
2018 marks the 150th anniversary of a number of constitutional conventions in Southern states during Reconstruction. One lasting achievement was creating universal education systems.
