Olivia Weisser Furtive trysts. Regretful dalliances. Fleeting affairs. Sexual secrets were nothing new in the 1700s, but confessing them to a doctor became surprisingly common in published medical cases of venereal disease. In one instance, a woman consulted a surgeon for a common reproductive ailment known as “the whites.” She […]
Benjamin Franklin’s dalliances with a cod may not seem particularly notable, given his other exploits.
The American Revolution is impossible to understand without food and sex at its center.
Kelly A. Ryan On January 11, 1779, Nabby Whitmore, a white single woman from Royalston, Massachusetts, confessed to Justice of the Peace Abel Wilder that she was pregnant with a child that “was likely to be born a bastard.” Whitmore told Wilder that the father of her child was William […]
Interview by Katherine Harvey with Jennifer Evans A sweeping history of changing sexual attitudes and behaviours in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s The Origins of Sex explores the history of the ‘first sexual revolution’. The book traces the transformation of western approaches to sexuality during the Age of Enlightenment. Dabhoiwala detects […]
Rob Boddice The news is rife with fearful accounts of disease — influenza is epidemic and measles is re-emergent — and debates about how to inoculate against them. Opponents of vaccination, meanwhile, are fanning the flames of fear. Measles, for example, is entirely preventable, but remains among us because of […]
Katherine Harvey Welcome to Carnivalesque #107! Carnivalesque is an interdisciplinary blog carnival dedicated to pre-modern history (to c. 1800 C.E.), and NOTCHES is delighted to be hosting the final edition of 2014. If you are already a NOTCHES reader, then fear not, there is plenty of material on the history […]
