The Contested Space of the Victorian Vagina: The Myth of Vibrators and Hysteria Therapy

Well, folks, when I’m not indulging my love of movies that involve Flo Rida medleys, I sometimes try to be professionally legit. Obviously, this involves watching more movies or trying to figure out how to not snicker like a thirteen-year old boy while explaining the historical origins and uses of the vibrator. Frankly, I wasn’t even aware vibrators had a (contested) history. But while preparing a lecture on female hysteria and its treatments for an undergraduate history class, I uncovered a heated debate amongst historians on the limits of writing histories of sexuality and the role of scholarly ethics when using historical evidence. I hadn’t heard of technology historian Rachel …

Nothing Is Impossible, Except for Dinosaurs (and Smart Television)

30 Rock is kind of like a microbrew. Ten or fifteen years ago, most Americans didn’t know there was an option beyond Budweiser or, if you were feeling really adventurous, Heineken.  Due to restrictive local regulations and the apathy of the American beer industry, we didn’t know that you could pack a lot more flavor (and alcohol) into a 12 oz bottle. But once you had a Ranger IPA or a Bell’s Two Hearted, why would you want to go back to Yuengling? The same goes for TV. The sitcom has rarely been celebrated as an artistic medium, with the exception of the occasional M*A*S*H* or Seinfeld, but a number of new, smarter shows hit the airwaves in the last decade. Series like Community …

So You Say You’ll Change the Constitution: Seven Historians Respond to “Lincoln”

On this most American of holidays, we convened a roundtable of éminence grises (French for "nitpicking academics") to discuss the new film about the man many consider to be America's greatest President, Abraham Lincoln.  Here are their responses: Keith Orejel (Columbia University) First and foremost, I would like to say that I fully concur with Kate Masur’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, which draws attention to the film’s portrayal of “passive black characters” who are not only insufficiently examined, but also poorly captured when given rare screen time. That said I do think the movie offers a number of improvements on the more standard cinematic representations of the …

Making Modern San Francisco: Josh Sides’ Erotic City

Over the past twenty years, historians charting the shifting geographies of 20th century sexuality have made some of the field’s strongest contributions. George Chauncey’s landmark publication Gay New York (1995) pushed back against notions that pre-World War II homosexuals languished in isolation and obscurity, presenting a coded gay subculture that clearly occupied a place in the public sphere. More recent works by Nan Boyd (2005) and Daniel Hurewitz (2007) focused primarily on the first half of the twentieth century. Each employed approaches that placed homosexuality squarely in the public spheres of their respective cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In many ways, Josh …

Long Island Ice Tea: Immigration, Gender, and the 2012 Presidential Debate

How in God’s name did we end up here?  Who decided to hold a presidential debate in the lobby of the Hempstead Holiday Inn?  And what are we to make of the two grey haired alpha males battling over who gets to sing “My Way” to this oddly accented (“Govna”) crowd of Long Islanders? Thank God moderator Candy Crowley handed out Mr. Goodbar-style beat downs on time management; Philadelphia’s Andy Reid ought to take notes. Once again, ToM’s editors found it in their narrow little hearts to throw me a bone.  Admittedly, I’ve never been one for town hall meetings, especially ones featuring questions from the most nebulous of all beasts, the “undecided voter.”  I have my …

Dog Days Classics: Lanny Budd, Upton Sinclair’s Ideal Idler

"It was profoundly true that movements of the spirit came first, and that events of history were consequences thereof." -Upton Sinclair, Wide is the Gate Several years ago I was directed toward Upton Sinclair’s socialist-minded quasi-spy novels about a young man named Lanning Prescott Budd. The 11 books span the breadth of time from the onset of The Great War to the rise of the Cold War, but as I have been able to acquire only the first half of the series, my investigation has followed Lanny only so far as the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. A New York Times reflection on the books gives a decent introduction to the protagonist: Born in 1900, he was the illegitimate child of an …

Hearting Hamas So Hard Right Now

It says something about where we are that a play called I Heart Hamas can be staged in America without the actors, writers, and producers being run out of town on a rail.  Ten years ago it did not seem like someone could even say “I Heart Palestine” without being hooted down with howls of derision.  I recall the sorry spectacle of a UNCC anthropology professor who wrote to the Charlotte Observer to rebut a virulently racist op-ed piece in the early 2000s; to claim that Palestinians are not, in fact, innately bloodthirsty and fixated on nothing but revenge made Gregory Starrett a lonely voice indeed. Academics such as Edward Said, Joseph Massad, and Nadia Abu el Haj have been hounded …

“When She Talks, I Hear the Revolution”: Looking Back at the Riot Grrrl Revolt

Anyone whose has a cable subscription to IFC probably recognizes Carrie Brownstein from her comedic stylings on the channel’s popular show Portlandia.  Yet, fewer may know that Brownstein currently plays guitar for Wild Flag or along with Corin Tucker founded seminal Pac NW rock group Sleater Kinney.  Formed in 1994, Sleater Kinney (the band functioned as a three piece and had three different drummers over the course of its existence) has often been pegged as part of the Riot Grrrl Movement.  However, if one reads Sara Marcus’s engaging Girls to the Front:  The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, Sleater Kinney appears to be the belated second wave of the movement, a culmination …

Bergman on Mars: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia

On the way out of Lars von Trier’s new film Melancholia, a slightly dazed patron asked me and my friends what the whole thing was about. “It was about a director who’s a depressed asshole and wanted to make a movie about himself,” I said. Well, I got that, the man replied. But what else was it about? “Everything and nothing” is a tempting answer. One can see it as an expression of von Trier’s own crippling depression, embodied in the spectacle of a limp, lifeless Kirsten Dunst being dragged to and draped on the bathtub by her patient sibling (Charlotte Gainsbourg). The director’s wife has said that such scenes were based on her own experience of dealing with her husband’s …

Visions of the “Long Emergency”: How Will We Live After Peak Oil?

Stories about the end of the world are as old as culture itself. While many traditional belief systems posit history as an endless cycle of renewal, humans have often imagined time as having a beginning and an end, an origin story and an apocalypse or day of judgment. In modern society, these stories have often taken the form of dystopian literature; Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World depict a kind of “end of history,” where the despotism of politics and technology have extinguished humanity’s potential for progress, either by grinding people down with pain or numbing them with pleasure. More recently, we have seen tales of nuclear disaster (Cloud Atlas), environmental …