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Illustration of sex workers behind waving American flag.

How the United States Tried to Get on Top of the Sex Trade

Why should American exceptionalism end at the red-light district?
by Rebecca Mead via The New Yorker on December 9, 2024
A sex worker on Cass Avenue, Detroit, 1965.

Red Lights, Blue Lines

Three recent books examine the discrimination and hypocrisy at the heart of policing “vice.”
by Sarah Schulman via New York Review of Books on March 3, 2023
Black and white picture of J. Edgar Hoover, sitting at a desk, 1932.

The FBI and the Madams

J. Edgar Hoover saw the political effectiveness of cracking down on elite brothel madams—but not their clients—in New York City.
by Matthew Wills, Jessica Pliley via JSTOR Daily on November 5, 2022
Lithograph of men and women drinking and dancing at an American Dance House.

The Influences of the Underworld: Nineteenth-Century Brothel Guides, Cards, and City Directories

Brothel guides tended to be small, making them easy to conceal. They also mimicked other publications to make it easier to hide the guides’ true purpose.
by Brittney Ingersoll via Commonplace on March 1, 2022
Prosecutor Linda Fairstein, left, during a news conference in New York on March 26, 1988. Seated at the table next to her are District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and Ellen Levin, mother of Jennifer Levin, who was murdered in 1986. (Charles Wenzelberg/AP)
partner

Linda Fairstein is Under Fire for the Central Park Five. But Another Part of Her Career Deserves Greater Scrutiny

By targeting sex workers, she enacted policies that harmed the most vulnerable women.
by Anne Gray Fischer via Made By History on June 12, 2019
North Street, Boston, in 1894.

The Universal Cause

A history of reformers targeting sex trafficking in pursuit of other aims.
by Hallie Lieberman via Lapham’s Quarterly on May 6, 2019
Lithograph of a bachelor from 1848.

Brothels for Gentlemen: Nineteenth-Century American Brothel Guides, Gentility, and Moral Reform

Brothel guides’ descriptions of brothelgoers asked that if respectable men could enjoy sexual pleasure for sale in American cities, why couldn’t their readers?
by Katherine Hijar via Commonplace on December 1, 2018
North Street, Boston, in 1894.

Secrets of a Brothel Privy

An archaeologist reconstructs the daily lives of 19th-century sex workers in Boston.
by Anna Goldfield via Sapiens on March 6, 2018
Louis Armstrong performs on the Kraft Music Hall TV show at NBC Studios in Brooklyn in June 1967 in New York.

Louis Armstrong’s Difficult Upbringing Revealed in Family Police Records

A new book reveals the jazz musician’s mother and sister were arrested several times for prostitution in New Orleans.
by Dalya Alberge via The Guardian on February 1, 2025
Peeling paint.

On “White Slavery” and the Roots of the Contemporary Sex Trafficking Panic

The ruling class used false claims about white women’s sexual virtue to regulate sexuality. But the “white slavery” panic was also about race, class and labor.
by Chanelle Gallant, Elene Lam via Literary Hub on December 12, 2024
Nan Lurie's "Women's House of Detention drawing in Greenwich Village.

How Greenwich Village Became America’s Bohemia

Greenwich Village’s bohemian and queer culture roots lie in its history of incarcerating women, notably via the Women’s Court and House of Detention.
by Hugh Ryan via The Gotham Center on November 20, 2024
Still from Midnight Cowboy of a man with a gun in Times Square.

How the Movies Captured Times Square’s Grimy Golden Age

Times Square’s decline can be dated to the Depression, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the bottom fell out.
by Nathaniel Rich via Current (The Criterion Collection) on July 25, 2024
Drawing of a classic pirate figure, wtih an earring, a tricorn hat, and a satchel, yelling orders at a crew while a ship burns in the background

Were Pirates Foes of the Modern Order—or Its Secret Sharers?

We’ve long viewed them as liberty-loving rebels. But it’s time to take off the eye patch.
by Daniel Immerwahr via The New Yorker on July 15, 2024
Nihomachi Hotel in Seattle's Japantown.

Seattle’s Japantown Was Once Part of a Bustling Red Light District — Until Residents Were Pushed Out

The erased histories of the communities that built Seattle.
by Nina Wallace via Densho: Japanese American Incarceration and Japanese Internment on March 18, 2024
Illustration of Asian woman surrounded by flowers

Sex, Death, and Empire: The Roots of Violence Against Asian Women

The line from America’s earliest empire in the Philippines to Japan, Korea, Vietnam—and anti-Asian violence at home—is straight, clear, and written in blood.
by Panthea Lee via The Nation on April 18, 2022
Photograph of Mrs. Frank Leslie

‘Mrs. Frank Leslie’ Ran a Media Empire and Bankrolled the Suffragist Movement

A new book tells the scandalous secrets of a forgotten 19th-century tycoon, Miriam Follin Peacock Squier Leslie Wilde, also known as Mrs. Frank Leslie.
by Gillian Brockell via Retropolis on March 28, 2022
Collage: a pair of arms wraps around collections of newspapers reporting on AIDS and plays guitar strings.

An AIDS Activist's Archive

June Holmes was in her late twenties, working as a social worker on Long Island, when she first heard about “this thing called AIDS.”
by Scott Wasserman Stern via New York Review of Books on October 29, 2021
Collage of Stephen Crane with Civil War scenes

The Miracle of Stephen Crane

Born after the Civil War, he turned himself into its most powerful witness—and modernized the American novel.
by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on October 18, 2021
Black women, oil painting

Rebellious History

Saidiya Hartman’s "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments" is a strike against the archives’ silence regarding the lives of Black women in the shadow of slavery.
by Annette Gordon-Reed via New York Review of Books on October 1, 2020
A police officer on a horse in a city street
partner

The Problem With Asking Police to Enforce Public Health Measures

Policing public health is likely to result in increased racial disparities.
by Emily M. Brooks via Made By History on August 10, 2020

Old New York, Seen Through a Cab Driver’s Windshield

The people Joseph Rodriguez saw through the windshield in the 1970s and 80s.
by Joseph Rodriguez via Intelligencer on October 27, 2017

Jane Addams’s Crusade Against Victorian “Dancing Girls”

Jane Addams, a leading Victorian-era reformer, believed dance halls were “one of the great pitfalls of the city.”
by Erin Blakemore via JSTOR Daily on October 11, 2017
A sketch of a woman praying outside.

“To Eat This Big Universe as Her Oyster”

Margaret Fuller and the first major work of American feminism.
by Randall Fuller via The Public Domain Review on October 29, 2024
A man lifts a woman out of a boat and onto the pier. Photo from London, 1925.

The Complex History of American Dating

While going out on a date may seem like a natural thing to do these days, it wasn't always the case.
by Ashawnta Jackson, Beth Bailey via JSTOR Daily on August 8, 2024
Planned Parenthood center in Kentucky

The 113-Year-Old Law Behind Anti-Abortion Activists’ Latest Scheme

The Christian right is pushing a slate of laws to stop a new, vague offense they have dubbed “abortion trafficking.”
by Melissa Gira Grant via The New Republic on September 7, 2023
A woman behind bars, and hands writing.

A History of Incarceration by Women Who Have Lived Through It

The members of the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project scrutinize official records not only for what they reveal, but also for what they omit.
by Rachael Bedard via The New Yorker on May 22, 2023
People outside the entrance to Luna Park on Coney Island, New York, 1890.

Luna Park and the Amusement Park Boom

The fortunes of Coney Island have waxed and waned, but in the early twentieth century, its amusement parks became a major American export.
by Betsy Golden Kellem via JSTOR Daily on March 29, 2023
Illustrations on the cover and inside of the book “Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls or War on the White Slave Trade," depicting poor woman behind bars and a rich woman dining with a man.
partner

The Supreme Court Letting States Mandate Morals Will End Badly

History shows laws will end up as weapons deployed in discriminatory ways to curtail freedom.
by Nancy Unger via Made By History on July 13, 2022
Portrait of Zalumma Agra.

Circassian Beauty in the American Sideshow

Among P. T. Barnum's “human curiosities” was a supposed escapee from an Ottoman harem, marketed as both the pinnacle of white beauty and an exotic other.
by Betsy Golden Kellem via The Public Domain Review on September 16, 2021
Collage of women's rights symbolism. Woman outline waving flag.

Who Lost the Sex Wars?

Fissures in the feminist movement should not be buried as signs of failure but worked through as opportunities for insight.
by Amia Srinivasan via The New Yorker on September 3, 2021
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