Meant to flag this up before for anyone who's interested: Chuck Upchurch, A Masterclass: Queer History: When did the popular ‘GAY’ LGBT+/Human Rights Campaign really start?
How about the ‘Gay’ Reform Movement of the 1830’s!?
Pioneering research by US Historian Charles Upchurch, whose specialist area is the first half of the 19th century, has ( Read more... )

History and the state: supporting institutional memory or challenging national myths?. Several historians' essays addressing this issue of particular present relevance.
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And on something that is not perhaps quite perpetuating national myth, but is still, perhaps, trying to fudge a dreadful record: ‘A Dark, Difficult, and Shameful Chapter’: Dr ( Read more... )

It so perchanced that over the last week I was reading two books about poets - Frances Bingham's Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life and Alison Lurie's memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson, Familiar Spirits.
There were moments, reading about the ongoing draaaama of Ackland's life, that I was somewhat reminded of this passage in Cold ( Read more... )

This is interesting, particularly in the context of the recent flurry of studies of Virago Press, Lucy Delap, Feminist Business Praxis and Spare Rib Magazine, in what I see is a themed journal issue on feminist publishing, which appears to be Open Access, right-on, sisters! and also to included work on some of the UK feminist publishers that weren' ( Read more... )

You know, I would be a bit more convinced by this (article about The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes), if the author were not described as holding a post which does not exist - people are not Professors of 'the University of London' but of one or other of the constituent colleges federated to it. This may be a reporter's error, I suppose. There had also ( Read more... )

The first black student at Oxford University: The University did not start recording the ethnicity of its students until late the following century, so we cannot say with absolute certainty that Cole was the first black student; but his presence in Oxford was remarked upon by contemporaries, suggesting that his appearance was something new. ( Read more... )

Am a bit miffed to discover that I became a member of the National Trust just a bit too late to qualify for a vote in the forthcoming Council election. Sigh.
Though looking through the candidates' manifestos, there were some I was slightly side-eying for the possible dog-whistles about tradition, but most of them did at least indicate long ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Grumpy Fake Boyfriend - a bit on the slight side.
Somehow found myself diverted into a re-read of Tony Fennelly's Matt Sinclair mysteries (he was the gay proprietor of a posh furniture store in New Orleans, scion of a family with deep roots in the region, and also at one time legally qualified): The Glory Hole Murders (1985), ( Read more... )

Review of book on abortion in early modern Italy: When Abortion Was a Necessary Sin: The history of abortion in Catholic Italy as described by Christopoulos was largely familiar from what I already knew about Protestant England, Germany, and the United States. These western contexts, which share a larger history of medical practice and Christian ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Stripping Gypsy, which was interesting, but I think it had a bit that problem of Doing A Biography when, if you know a bit about the period and other women doing similar things, you think, well, she was part of a context? and probably not the only woman making a remunerative career who had Issues with Men and Marriage, and ( Read more... )