Julia Laite The world has just commemorated the 100th annivesary of the beginning of the First World War. While most historians have come to categorize the war as, in the words of Richard Evans, ‘the seminal catastrophe of the entire period’, ideologically driven government officials and some military historians insist that […]
Author: Julia Laite
Historians are gossips who tease the dead
Julia Laite I have recently been pondering Voltaire’s much quoted but rarely contextualized observation that ‘historians are gossips who tease the dead’. It goes to the heart of something that’s been bothering me ever since I dug further into the details of a case of a young woman who had appeared in my […]
Jack the Ripper: Case Never Closed
This article by Notches editor Julia Laite appeared in the September 9, 2014 issue of The Guardian. The latest development in a near-150-year-old saga made headlines this week: an armchair detective has used DNA evidence to claim that Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper, the infamous figure who murdered and mutilated women in […]
(Sexual) Labour Day
Julia Laite I’ve often said that researching prostitution makes me more of a labour historian than a historian of sexuality. Despite having typically been lumped into the same categories as homosexuality and other perceived sexual deviances, women who sold sex in the past connected their actions not to their sexuality but to […]
Beards, Real Men, and Poseurs: male sexuality and fashion since around 1900
Julia Laite A recent post by regular blogger Nikki Daniels (‘An open letter to bearded hipsters’) that has made the usual rounds of facebook and twitter has got me thinking about how male fashion has long been central to the way we define what it means to be a ‘real’ man. The blogger wrote about […]
Valentine’s as Prostitution, Marriage as a Trade: Commerce, Sex, History (and a recipe)
Julia Laite The only thing that I like about Valentine’s Day is the fact that it comes along with my family’s tradition of making a chocolate torte that is basically nothing but butter, eggs, ground almonds, and sugar, which I eat for breakfast.[1] Growing up in Canada, Valentine’s was a […]
Sinead and Miley: A History Lesson
Julia Laite Ok, so I know that the Sinead/Miley thing is old news, lying (by internet standards) in the distant past of November, 2013. You can feel free to remind yourself of it here. But seeing as one of my major points is about the repetitive nature of debates over […]
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The Catholic Church and Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth-Century Ireland
Reverend Anna Garlin Spencer and the Rise of “Family Life” in Early Sex Education