Posted: October 3, 2023
In the years following the Civil War, pioneers in the women’s rights movement, women’s medical education, and public-private charitable partnerships joined forces to reduce the incidence of abortion in America. As alumni of the abolitionist movement, they analyzed abortion in ways that resembled their earlier critiques of slavery. Abortion, too, was a structural problem. A […]
Posted: September 25, 2023
Frances Willard (1839-1898) was one of the most prominent American social reformers of the late nineteenth century. As the long-time president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Willard built a national and international movement of women that campaigned for prohibition, women’s rights, economic justice, and numerous other social justice issues during the Gilded Age. […]
Posted: September 25, 2023
Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776–1914 by Elizabeth Kelly Gray explores American drug use and drug policy through the era when regulation was ineffective at the state level and non-existent at the national level. Habit-forming drugs were sold over the counter. Americans consumed hashish candy, visited opium dens for pleasure, self-administered injections of morphine, […]
Posted: September 25, 2023
Woodrow Wilson’s presidential administration (1913-1921) was marked not only by America’s participation in World War I, but also by numerous armed interventions by the United States in other countries. Spanning the globe, these actions included the years-long occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a border war with Mexico, and the use of Marines guarding American citizens during unrest in Chinese cities. In Woodrow Wilson’s Wars, author Mark Benbow examines what these American policy decisions and military adventures […]
Posted: September 25, 2023
When is a war a holy crusade? And when does theology cause Christians to condemn violence? In American Crusade, Benjamin Wetzel argues that the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I shared a cultural meaning for white Protestant ministers in the United States, who considered each conflict to be a modern-day crusade. American […]
Posted: September 20, 2023
In Making Catholic America, William S. Cossen shows how Catholic men and women worked to prove themselves to be model American citizens in the decades between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Far from being outsiders in American history, Catholics took command of public life in the early twentieth century, claiming leadership in the […]
Posted: September 20, 2023
In Making Machines of Animals, Neal A. Knapp explains the motivations of both the meatpackers and the professors, describing how they deployed the International to redefine animality itself. Both professors and packers hoped to replace so-called scrub livestock with”improved” animals and created a new taxonomy of animal quality based on the burgeoning eugenics movement. The […]
Posted: September 20, 2023
On an autumn day in 1895, eighteen-year-old Loyd Montgomery shot his parents and a neighbor in a gruesome act that reverberated beyond the small confines of Montgomery’s Oregon farming community. The dispassionate slaying and Montgomery’s consequent hanging exposed the fault lines of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society and revealed the burdens of pioneer narratives […]
Receive a year's subscription to our quarterly SHGAPE journal.