Atlantic slave societies were notorious deathtraps. In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean , Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave s ...
As part of the process of consideration for sainthood, the body of Filippo Neri, «the apostle of Rome,» was dissected shortly after he died in 1595. The finest doctors of the papal court were brought in to ensure that the procedure was completed with the utmost care. These physicians found that Neri exhibited a most unusual anatomy. His fourth and fifth ribs had somehow been broken to make room for his strangely enormous and extraordinarily musc ...
The seventeenth-century French diplomat François de Callières once wrote that «an ambassador resembles in some way an actor exposed on the stage to the eyes of the public in order to play great roles.» The comparison of the diplomat to an actor became commonplace as the practice of diplomacy took hold in early modern Europe. More than an abstract metaphor, it reflected the rich culture of spectacular entertainment that was ...
It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates ...
Most histories of modern American politics tell a similar story: that the Sunbelt, with its business friendly environment, right-to-work laws, and fierce spirit of frontier individualism, provided the seedbed for popular conservatism. Stacie Taranto challenges this narrative by positioning New York State as a central battleground. In 1970, under the governorship of Republican Nelson Rockefeller, New York became one of the first states to legaliz ...
Robert McNamara is best known for his key role in the escalation of the Vietnam War as U.S. secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The familiar story begins with the brilliant young executive transforming Ford Motor Company, followed by his rise to political power under Kennedy, and culminating in his downfall after eight years of failed military policies. Many believe McNamara's fall from grace after Viet ...
From the creation of newspapers with national reach in the late nineteenth century to the lightning-fast dispatches and debates of today's Internet, the media have played an enormous role in modern American politics. Scholars of political history universally concede the importance of this relationship yet have devoted scant attention to its development during the past century. Even as mass media have largely replaced party organizations as ...
Aging is a preoccupation shared by beauty bloggers, serious journalists, scientists, doctors, celebrities—arguably all of adult America, given the pervasiveness of the crusade against it in popular culture and the media. We take our youth-oriented culture as a given but, as Lawrence R. Samuel argues, this was not always the case. Old age was revered in early America, in part because it was so rare. Indeed, it was not until the 1960s, a ...
When celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted despaired in 1870 that the «restraining and confining conditions» of the city compelled its inhabitants to «look closely upon others without sympathy,» he was expressing what many in the United States had already been saying about the nascent urbanization that would continue to transform the nation's landscape: that the modern city dramatically changes the way individuals interact wi ...
