I recently had the opportunity to attend an exciting historical "Votes for Women" presentation at my local public library.  As you may know, California was the sixth state of the United States to recognize women's right to vote, and California voted in this change precisely one hundred years ago this month, long before the Nineteenth Amendment to ( Read more... )

[No boom and bust] was greater than the financial crisis that began in September 1873 with the collapse of Jay Cooke & Co., the nation’s premier investment bank [which] launched the first economic crisis of the Industrial Age. ... In the face of economic calamity and skyrocketing unemployment, the government did, well, nothing ( Read more... )

I'd like to recommend the dose of perspective in "Those Manly Men of Yore," a brief essay by Sara Lipton, published on the Op-Ed page of the NYT on 06/16.  Excerpt:

For most of Western history, the primary and most valued characteristic of manhood was self-mastery.  Late antique and Roman writers, like Plutarch, lauded men for their ability to ( Read more... )

Last week, I happened to both watch Picnic (1955) and read A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (2011) by Stephanie Coontz.  They complement each other interestingly.  The movie supplies a kind of shadow-box diorama of the cultural situation at the time The Feminine Mystique (1963) came out; the ( Read more... )

Two books by science journalist/historian Gary Taubes have impressed me enormously. Over the past few months, I’ve read the public library copies of his newer, shorter, easier-to-read, mass-audience Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It twice, and his older, longer, densely-packed, scholarly-audience Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the ( Read more... )

London's Sinful Secret: The Bawdy History and Very Public Passions of London's Georgian Age by Dan Cruickshank (St. Martin's Press, 2010) is a bit of a tome, a good old-fashioned 654-page hardbacked nonfiction doorstop.  If you are enthralled by eighteenth or nineteenth-century British history -- or women's issues, the sex industry, the ( Read more... )

Near the end of the 1944 serial Zorro's Black Whip -- in which an 1880s Idaho newspaper publisher and masked vigilante named Barbara Meredith (Linda Stirling) leads her territory toward statehood cleverly and persistently, in anachronistic outfits -- comes a clip show.  This surprised and amused me ( Read more... )

Looking through American Food Habits in Historical Perspective (1995) by Elaine N. McIntosh last week, I encountered a disease called pellagra -- niacin (vitamin B3) deficiency -- which spread across the world with corn (maize) cultivation, first diagnosed in Europe in the eighteenth century, reaching epidemic proportions in the US South in the ( Read more... )

Several months ago, I read a review of a new history of the Harvey restaurants and their role in western expansion.  This week, I checked out the 1946 musical The Harvey Girls from the library.  Starring Judy Garland, Angela Lansbury and some gentlemen I'd never heard of before, it's a very satisfactory example of its genre, and more realistic ( Read more... )

That Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush (1998, Epicenter Press) by Lael Miller is a somewhat lightweight contribution to the scholarship is perhaps best exemplified by the moment Miller dismisses a question as "better not researched."  (I speculate that this is to protect still-living children or grandchildren ( Read more... )