kitchen of the future baby boomers

Did Better Household Technology Create the Baby Boomers?

The Baby Boomers have been blamed for everything from economic stagnation to America's current political situation. But where did they come from?
Presidential facial hair

The Meaning of a Mustache

To shave or not to shave? At the start of the twentieth century, a trend away from facial hair reflected dramatic social and economic shifts.
Leave It To Beaver family dad

When Ward Cleaver Caused Social Anxiety

In the early 1960s, an Illinois Children and Family Services worker tried to figure out how TV dads were impacting contemporary American fathers.
First sentence

Female Inventive Talent

Brief commentary on one line from JSTOR: An unsigned editorial from an 1870s issue of Scientific American suggests that women can be great inventors, too.
Rudy Vallee

The Gender Politics of the First Boy Bands

Crooning, a musical style of the late 1920s and early 1930s, was fraught with gender panic. Where the singers manly enough?
Dance hall illustration

Jane Addams’s Crusade Against Victorian “Dancing Girls”

Jane Addams, a leading Victorian-era reformer, believed dance halls were “one of the great pitfalls of the city.”
Choctaw woman

How 19th Century Women Were Taught to Think About Native Americans

In nineteenth-century American women's magazines, Native American women were depicted as attractive, desirable, and pious.
Victoria wedding

A Natural History of the Wedding Dress

The history of the wedding dress is shorter than the history of weddings, and even shorter still than the history of marriage.
The Nightmare

The Racialized History of “Hysteria”

Even three decades after “hysteria” was deleted from the DSM-III, some of the word’s diagnostic power obviously still remains.
frame capture

Facing Ourselves Online

The photographic pressure to curate our faces is inextricable from the online pressure to curate our lives; to present and perform.