I can’t remember where I first learned anything about this man, or why I decided to start with Notes of a Native Son. I do remember the muggy, summer evening that I, on a bit of a whim, drove straight to one of my favorite bookstores after getting off work. I also purchased Audre Lorde’s … More I’m falling in love with James Baldwin, and it’s pissing me off.
In 2020 fashion, this Labor Day weekend was strange for me and my crew. It was too hot for camping–not to mention all the other people we were bound to run into, since the virus has rendered most other folks’ primary pastimes ill-advised at best and cancelled at worst. When I was still going to … More Living in the liminal
I should really write blog posts more than once a year. I’ll put that on my ever-expanding list of goals for 2020. This is me checking in after 18 months or so in corporate America. What a strange, challenging, fascinating journey it’s been. I decided to take the plunge after hanging out around the office … More Why I chose the Slow Game, and how that’s working out for me
I graduated from a History of Science program in May of 2018 and have been serving as an intern in the human resources department of a relatively large and well-known industrial construction company. Talk about contrast. I have been forced through exposure and an increasingly intense desire to get out of my parents’ house to … More The Transition
I reread my thesis today. It’s always a scary practice, reading your own writing after you’ve let it sit for awhile. But I came away pleased overall, and the time I’ve spend out of the academic world has made it a lot easier to reflect on some of the real-world implications of my research. I … More Post-Thesis Thinking
It is done, and it is online for anyone to read! The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a crisis in therapeutics as scientific developments overturned the theoretical underpinnings of humoral medicine, leaving room for lively and pluralistic discourses of health and healing. This thesis examines the controversies surrounding therapeutics in late nineteenth-century America through … More Science and the Construction of Health in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, 1879-1906
Howard C. Westwood, “The Federals’ Cold Shoulder to Arkansas’ Powell Clayton,” Civil War History 26, no. 3 (1980): 240-255. Here Westwood tells the story of Reconstruction after Arkansas was reintegrated into the Union and Federal forces were removed. Ku Klux Klan violence was rampant, and the first Republican governor Powell Clayton was forced by a lack of … More Thesis Revisions: Contextualization in AR History
Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). This is a strange one, but offers and interesting and valuable perspective on neurasthenia in its heyday primarily through the use of literary sources. Lutz takes what can loosely be described as a microhistorical approach with the goal of showing how a … More American Nervousness, 1903
Barbara Will, “The Nervous Origins of the American Western,” American Literature 20, no. 2 (1998): 293-316. Will looks at the role that neurasthenia played in the development of the idea of the American West, specifically in its literary iteration. Neurasthenia, as defined by George Beard and Silas Mitchell, was a disease brought on (specifically in men) by … More The Nervous Origins of the American Western
F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870-1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). Gosling provides a history of neurasthenia before Freud entered the scene of American psychology that considers those outside the “elite” group of physicians (Beard, Mitchell, and co.) who developed the concept in the late 19th century. As … More Before Freud
Quillets and Quackery 