In the third installment of “Field Notes: Public History in the GAPE,” Director of Museum Affairs and Chief Curator Leslie B. Jones speaks to her work at the Preservation Society of Newport County, also known as the Newport Mansions. Located in Rhode Island, the Preservation Society stewards eleven historic properties, including iconic Gilded Age properties like The Breakers and the oldest and northernmost topiary garden in the country. The Newport Mansions are among the top visited arts and cultural institutions in New England, educating hundreds of thousands of guests annually.
Field Notes: The Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums
In the second installment of “Field Notes: Public History in the GAPE,” Historian Joshua Dubbert, with support from Communications and Marketing Manager Kristina Smith, discusses the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums. Located in Fremont, Ohio, the organization interprets the life, career, legacy, and times of America’s 19th president, Rutherford B. Hayes. The site offers a variety of public tours and programming throughout the historic Spiegel Grove estate, including special offerings for America’s Semiquincentennial. Dubbert and Smith speak to the site’s unique history and scope, as well as how ongoing research is continuously building a fuller portrait of the Hayes family.
Field Notes: Liz Ferry and the Driehaus Museum
Located in Chicago, the Driehaus Museum engages guests through architecture, art, and design within the 1883 Nickerson Mansion and the 1926 Murphy Auditorium. In this installment of “Field Notes,” Guest Services Coordinator Liz Ferry shares how the Museum’s rich interpretational scope, talented staff, and growing network of institutional connections help preserve these truly unique spaces and tailor the guest experience for maximum engagement. Driehaus Museum Executive Director Lisa Key will join other museum leaders on June 6 for the Closing Plenary of the SHGAPE Conference.
SEX RADICAL: A New Film About a Woman Who Battled the Comstock Regime
Historians of the Gilded Age are certainly familiar with the nefarious deeds of the evangelical “vice-hunter,” Anthony Comstock, but they may not know the story of Ida Craddock, a sex educator, scholar, and sexual mystic who challenged Comstock face-to-face, and who inspired her contemporaries by her courage. SEX RADICAL, the latest film from award-winning writer/director Andy Kirshner tells Craddock’s remarkable story. It will premiere at the end of this month, both theatrically and online.
Wobbly Justice: Guilt by Association in Progressive-Era Seattle
On June 22, 1918, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) named Walker Smith was arrested at his home in Seattle. Two Scottish sisters, Janet and Margaret Roy, were arrested with him, and unlike Smith and the many others he consorted with, they were not American citizens. As foreigners, the sisters’ experience in the American legal system, the newspaper coverage devoted to them, and their attempts to thwart the immigration laws that targeted them provide an example of how American immigration law and practice sought to ideologically sort and control new arrivals to the United States.
Anthony Comstock, Abortion, and the Arrest of Madame Restell
Anthony Comstock arrested many people, but perhaps none was so famous as Madame Restell, whom he arrested on February 11, 1878, for selling contraceptives and abortifacients. Because Restell remains best known as an abortion provider, and because Comstock succeeded in passing a federal statute that bears his name, one might assume that abortion occupied a central place in his campaign, or that Restell was arrested for performing an abortion. Neither is completely accurate. By taking the arrest of Restell as a case study, this post considers the various legal modes by which Comstock did his work, and the way he understood abortion as related to his greater campaign against obscenity and sexual license.
Targeting Victoria Woodhull: The Visual Debates that Drove Anthony Comstock’s Pursuit of the First Woman to Run for United States President
Anthony Comstock, an evangelical Christian who made it his mission to protect public morals, almost certainly imagined the woman who promoted free love as the personification of evil. He needed public support for his crusade, and this cartoon by Thomas Nast helped him win it.
Robert W. McAfee: The Comstock of Chicago
By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly every state had enacted or revised some sort of anti-obscenity statute, and eight of the country’s ten largest cities had an anti-vice society. This blog post spotlights one understudied arm of the apparatus: Robert W. McAfee. Although McAfee never rivaled Comstock’s prominence in the press and in public imagination, he was instrumental to the expansion and daily operation of the Comstock regime across stretches of the Midwest, Upper South, and Great Plains.
Abortion, Contraception, and the Comstock Law’s Original Medical Exemption, 1873-1936
The Comstock Act of 1873 was not meant to be, nor did it ever function as, a total abortion ban. This fact is important to emphasize in our current political moment because those who want to revive the statute have argued that the Comstock Act is an existing (if dormant) law that already bans abortion on a federal level. They have also argued that the law completely outlawed abortion in the past. The statute’s legislative and enforcement history, however, tells a different story. It was first and foremost a law about obscenity and sexual purity.
Comstock, Reconstruction Politics, and Moral Surveillance
It is best to think of Anthony Comstock’s campaign against vice as a response to Reconstruction that afflicted the nation long after that period was over. Comstock’s rise in the 1870s was not organic; it was backed by wealthy patrons engaged in intense political fighting over issues such as racial equality, taxation, and democracy. And although Comstock began by arresting vendors of so-called obscene goods, he soon expanded his portfolio, pursuing folks of every race and gender engaged in erotic, profane, or blasphemous correspondence.
Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws: A JGAPE Forum Preview
This blog series aims to provide vital historical context for those seeking to understand the modern revival of Anthony Comstock and his namesake law. The Comstock Act has never been repealed and remains part of Sections 1461 and 1462 in the United States Code, although many Americans have little to no idea about the details of this law, if they have even heard of it. Anthony Comstock himself seems like an odd joke today: a repressed, puritanical, anti-sex reformer and a relic of a bygone past. And yet, because the act has been revived as a strategy for limiting access to reproductive healthcare, Comstock is no joke.
Call for Participation: Mark Twain House and Museum Essay Series
The Mark Twain House and Museum has just launched a new program called “It Happened in Your Town.” They are inviting Connecticut teachers, students, and historical societies to provide research on their local communities in the year 1874. The museum invites SHGAPE members to put this research in a broader context for the public through a series of short essays.