Download or read book Lust on Trial written by Amy Werbel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthony Comstock was America’s first professional censor. From 1873 to 1915, as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a crusade against lasciviousness, salaciousness, and obscenity that resulted in the confiscation and incineration of more than three million pictures, postcards, and books he judged to be obscene. But as Amy Werbel shows in this rich cultural and social history, Comstock’s campaign to rid America of vice in fact led to greater acceptance of the materials he deemed objectionable, offering a revealing tale about the unintended consequences of censorship. In Lust on Trial, Werbel presents a colorful journey through Comstock’s career that doubles as a new history of post–Civil War America’s risqué visual and sexual culture. Born into a puritanical New England community, Anthony Comstock moved to New York in 1868 armed with his Christian faith and a burning desire to rid the city of vice. Werbel describes how Comstock’s raids shaped New York City and American culture through his obsession with the prevention of lust by means of censorship, and how his restrictions provided an impetus for the increased circulation and explicitness of “obscene” materials. By opposing women who preached sexual liberation and empowerment, suppressing contraceptives, and restricting artistic expression, Comstock drew the ire of civil liberties advocates, inspiring more open attitudes toward sexual and creative freedom and more sophisticated legal defenses. Drawing on material culture high and low, including numerous examples of the “obscenities” Comstock seized, Lust on Trial provides fresh insights into Comstock’s actions and motivations, the sexual habits of Americans during his era, and the complicated relationship between law and cultural change.

Download or read book The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder written by Robert Corn-Revere and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores the importance of free speech in America by telling the stories of its chief antagonists - the censors.

Download or read book Frauds Exposed written by Anthony Comstock and published by . This book was released on 1880 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Traps for the Young written by Anthony Comstock and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Man Who Hated Women written by Amy Sohn and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Best History Books of 2021 • "Fascinating . . . Purity is in the mind of the beholder, but beware the man who vows to protect yours.” —Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker Anthony Comstock, special agent to the U.S. Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with long sentences and steep fines. The word Comstockery came to connote repression and prudery. Between 1873 and Comstock’s death in 1915, eight remarkable women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. These “sex radicals” supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and women’s right to pleasure. They took on the fearsome censor in explicit, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, marriage, and love for a bold new era. In The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and in the press. They were publishers, writers, and doctors, and they included the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the virgin sexologist Ida C. Craddock; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to oppose a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, the sex radicals paved the way for second-wave feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined birth control access as a civil liberty. The Man Who Hated Women brings these women’s stories to vivid life, recounting their personal and romantic travails alongside their political battles. Without them, there would be no Pill, no Planned Parenthood, no Roe v. Wade. This is the forgotten history of the women who waged war to control their bodies.

Download or read book Family Limitation written by Margaret H. Sanger and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Family Limitation By Margaret H. Sanger Revised - Sixth Edition 1917 A Classic American Family Planning Booklet Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins, September 14, 1879 - September 6, 1966, also known as Margaret Sanger Slee) was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Sanger used her writings and speeches primarily to promote her way of thinking. She was prosecuted for her book Family Limitation under the Comstock Act in 1914. She was afraid of what would happen, so she fled to Britain until she knew it was safe to return to the US. Sanger's efforts contributed to several judicial cases that helped legalize contraception in the United States. Due to her connection with Planned Parenthood Sanger is a frequent target of criticism by opponents of abortion, although Planned Parenthood did not begin providing abortions until 1970, after Sanger had already died. Sanger, who has been criticized for supporting negative eugenics, remains an admired figure in the American reproductive rights movement.

Download or read book Julian Comstock written by Robert Charles Wilson and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-06-23 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Robert Charles Wilson, the Hugo Award-winning author of Spin, comes Julian Comstock, an exuberant adventure in a post-climate-change America. In the reign of President Deklan Comstock, a reborn United States is struggling back to prosperity. Over a century after the Efflorescence of Oil, after the Fall of the Cities, after the False Tribulation, after the days of the Pious Presidents, the sixty stars and thirteen stripes wave from the plains of Athabaska to the national capital in New York. In Colorado Springs, the Dominion sees to the nation's spiritual needs. In Labrador, the Army wages war on the Dutch. America, unified, is rising once again. Then out of Labrador come tales of the war hero "Captain Commongold." The masses follow his adventures in the popular press. The Army adores him. The President is...troubled. Especially when the dashing Captain turns out to be his nephew Julian, son of the President's late brother Bryce—a popular general who challenged the President's power, and paid the ultimate price. As Julian ascends to the pinnacle of power, his admiration for the works of the Secular Ancients sets him at fatal odds with the Dominion. Treachery and intrigue will dog him as he closes in on the accomplishment of his lifelong ambition: to make a film about the life of Charles Darwin. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book Imperiled Innocents written by Nicola Kay Beisel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral reform movements claiming to protect children began to emerge in the United States over a century ago, most notably when Anthony Comstock and his supporters crusaded to restrict the circulation of contraception, information on the sexual rights of women, and "obscene" art and literature. Much of their rhetoric influences debates on issues surrounding children and sexuality today. Drawing on Victorian accounts of pregnant girls, prostitutes, Free Lovers, and others deemed "immoral," Nicola Beisel argues that rhetoric about the moral corruption of children speaks to an ongoing parental concern: that children will fail to replicate or exceed their parents' social position. The rhetoric of morality, she maintains, is more than symbolic and goes beyond efforts to control mass behavior. For the Victorians, it tapped into the fear that their own children could fall prey to vice and ultimately live in disgrace. In a rare analysis of Anthony Comstock's crusade with the New York and New England Societies for the Suppression of Vice, Beisel examines how the reformer worked on the anxieties of the upper classes. One tactic was to link moral corruption with the flood of immigrants, which succeeded in New York and Boston, where minorities posed a political threat to the upper classes. Showing how a moral crusade can bring a society's diffuse anxieties to focus on specific sources, Beisel offers a fresh theoretical approach to moral reform movements.

Download or read book Attitudes Toward Sex in Antebellum America written by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz and published by Macmillan Higher Education. This book was released on 2006-02-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this colorful collection of documents, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz overturns the monolithic picture of Victorian sexual repression to reveal four contending views at play during the antebellum period: earthy American folk wisdom, the anti-flesh teachings of evangelical Christianity, moral reform grounded in science, and the utopian free love movement. Horowitz's introduction discusses how these diverse views shaped the antebellum conversation about the moral, social, and physical implications of sex and reflected the larger cultural and economic changes of this period of rapid industrialization and urban migration. Helpful headnotes contextualize this selection of hard-to-find documents, which includes scientific manuals, religious pamphlets, advertisements, and popular fiction. Contemporary illustrations, a chronology, and a bibliography foster students' understanding of antebellum sexual attitudes.

Download or read book Anthony Comstock Fighter written by Charles Gallaudet Trumbull and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book My Notorious Life written by Kate Manning and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-06-06 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'In the end, they celebrated. They bragged. They got me finally, was their feeling. They said I would take my secrets to the grave. They should be so lucky.' Defiant and daring, Axie Muldoon claws her way from the streets up to the dizzying heights of New York society. But as her fame grows and her name hits the headlines, her reputation as the most scandalous midwife of her time begins to threaten everything she holds dear. And one crusading official will not rest until he has brought about the downfall of 'Madame X'. It will take all of Axie's cunning to save both herself and those she loves from ruin...

Download or read book The Alienist written by Caleb Carr and published by Random House. This book was released on 2006-10-24 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A TNT ORIGINAL SERIES • “A first-rate tale of crime and punishment that will keep readers guessing until the final pages.”—Entertainment Weekly “Caleb Carr’s rich period thriller takes us back to the moment in history when the modern idea of the serial killer became available to us.”—The Detroit News When The Alienist was first published in 1994, it was a major phenomenon, spending six months on the New York Times bestseller list, receiving critical acclaim, and selling millions of copies. This modern classic continues to be a touchstone of historical suspense fiction for readers everywhere. The year is 1896. The city is New York. Newspaper reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned by his friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler—a psychologist, or “alienist”—to view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy abandoned on the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge. From there the two embark on a revolutionary effort in criminology: creating a psychological profile of the perpetrator based on the details of his crimes. Their dangerous quest takes them into the tortured past and twisted mind of a murderer who will kill again before their hunt is over. Fast-paced and riveting, infused with historical detail, The Alienist conjures up Gilded Age New York, with its tenements and mansions, corrupt cops and flamboyant gangsters, shining opera houses and seamy gin mills. It is an age in which questioning society’s belief that all killers are born, not made, could have unexpected and fatal consequences. Praise for The Alienist “[A] delicious premise . . . Its settings and characterizations are much more sophisticated than the run-of-the-mill thrillers that line the shelves in bookstores.”—The Washington Post Book World “Mesmerizing.”—Detroit Free Press “The method of the hunt and the disparate team of hunters lift the tale beyond the level of a good thriller—way beyond. . . . A remarkable combination of historical novel and psychological thriller.”—The Buffalo News “Engrossing.”—Newsweek “Gripping, atmospheric . . . intelligent and entertaining.”—USA Today “A high-spirited, charged-up and unfailingly smart thriller.”—Los Angeles Times “Keeps readers turning pages well past their bedtime.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Download or read book The Baldwin genealogy from 1500 to 1881 written by C.C. Baldwin and published by Рипол Классик. This book was released on 1991 with total page 989 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Huntington Family in America written by Huntington Family Association and published by . This book was released on 1915 with total page 1232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act written by Christopher M. Finan and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Upton Sinclair, famed author of The Jungle, was arrested for reading the First Amendment on Liberty Hill in 1923, The Nation commented: "When we contemplate the antics of the chief of police of Los Angeles, we are deterred from characterizing him as an ass only through fear that such a comparison would lay us open to damages from every self-respecting donkey." In this lively history of our most fundamental and perhaps most vulnerable right, Chris Finan traces the lifeline of free speech from the War on Terror back to the turn of the last century. During the YMCA's 1892 Suppression of Vice campaign, muttonchopped moralist Anthony Comstock railed against writings by that "Irish smut dealer" George Bernard Shaw. In the midst of the country's first Red Scare, the government rounded up thousands of Russian Americans for deportation during the Palmer raids. Decades later, a second Red Scare gripped the country as Senator Joseph McCarthy spearheaded a witch-hunt for "egg-sucking liberals" who defended "Communists and queers." Finan's dramatic review of such touchstones as the Scopes trial and Edward R. Murrow's challenge to Joseph McCarthy are revelatory; many of his narratives are entirely fresh and have as much relevance to our postndash;PATRIOT Act world as his final chapter on the twenty-first century. The story of the fight for free speech, in times of war and peace-when writers, publishers, booksellers, and librarians are often on the front lines-is essential reading. "Christopher Finan has given us a marvelously readable account of the struggle for free speech in the United States. Beginning with the birth of the American civil liberties movement during World War I, Finan traces the often grueling battles over free speech in wartime, book censorhip, McCarthyism, and freedom of the press that have marked the gradual evolution of American freedom. It is a story every American should know, for it is our nation's greatest achievement." -Geoffrey R. Stone, author of Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from The Sedition Act of 1798 to The War on Terrorism "The Founding Fathers gave us the First Amendment, but we have had to fight for free speech. Radicals, reactionaries, feminists, religious zealots, African Americans, Klansmen, college students, even schoolchildren, have played a role in expanding free speech. They are all present in Chris Finan's colorful narrative, which shows how much progress we have made-and how far we have to go." -Nadine Strossen, President of the American Civil Liberties Union and Professor of Law, New York Law School "In this masterful work, Chris Finan deftly chronicles the challenges to free speech in the twentieth century; an accessible, thought provoking history that not only informs, but also engages the reader." -Joyce Meskis, Owner, Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver "Concisely detailed and researched, From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act reads like high powered fiction. Characters as diverse as Roger Baldwin, Bernie Sanders, Allen Ginsberg, Fatty Arbuckle, Jane Russell, Anthony Comstock, John Ashcroft and Dwight Eisenhower share the stage to tell the tale of a nation at odds with its Puritan heritage. A timely addition to bookshelves as the United States wrestles with issues of privacy and personal freedoms in an age of terrorism tied to an unpopular war." -Kenton Oliver, Intellectual Freedom Committee Chair, the American Library Association "American history is marred by recurrent episodes of hate-Red scares, super-patriotism, fear of sexual expression. Christopher Finan brilliantly paints that record, and shows how courageous Americans have fought for freedom." -Anthony Lewis, author of Gideon's Trumpet and Make No Law Chris Finan is the president of the American Booksell

Download or read book The Wickedest Woman in New York written by Clifford Browder and published by Hamden, Conn. : Archon Books. This book was released on 1988 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of Madame Restell a New York City abortionist who practices her profession for forty years, despite public opinion.

Download or read book Margaret Sanger written by Jean H. Baker and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undoubtedly the most influential advocate for birth control even before the term existed, Margaret Sanger ignited a movement that has shaped our society to this day. Her views on reproductive rights have made her a frequent target of conservatives and so-called family values activists. Yet lately even progressives have shied away from her, citing socialist leanings and a purported belief in eugenics as a blight on her accomplishments. In this captivating new biography, the renowned feminist historian Jean H. Baker rescues Sanger from such critiques and restores her to the vaunted place in history she once held. Trained as a nurse and midwife in the gritty tenements of New York's Lower East Side, Sanger grew increasingly aware of the dangers of unplanned pregnancy—both physical and psychological. A botched abortion resulting in the death of a poor young mother catalyzed Sanger, and she quickly became one of the loudest voices in favor of sex education and contraception. The movement she started spread across the country, eventually becoming a vast international organization with her as its spokeswoman. Sanger's staunch advocacy for women's privacy and freedom extended to her personal life as well. After becoming a wife and mother at a relatively early age, she abandoned the trappings of home and family for a globe-trotting life as a women's rights activist. Notorious for the sheer number of her romantic entanglements, Sanger epitomized the type of "free love" that would become mainstream only at the very end of her life. That she lived long enough to see the creation of the birth control pill—which finally made planned pregnancy a reality—is only fitting.