April 2014
-
Hunger March Party
The problem of hunger rarely plays a significant role in food blogs. The genre inclines toward fantasies of plenty rather than narratives of need. There are blogs devoted to cooking on a budget, but even they emphasize pleasure not deprivation. (And of course there are blogs about hunger as a social and political problem, but they don’t have much to…
-
Is Blogging Scholarship?
Is Blogging Scholarship? A provocative question for a blog title, but not the deepest, which perhaps is a characteristic weakness of the blog as a medium. Ask a foreboding question, which hints that strongly negative views may follow after the link, in order to attract clicks. Whether you answer the question (or whether the question is well formulated) is…
-
Charity and Sylvia now out on Kindle!
My new book, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, is now available for sale on Kindle. Publisher’s Weekly calls the book “beautifully written” and “an utterly absorbing love story.” Read the full review here. Charity and Sylvia is the tale of two ordinary women who lived in an extraordinary same-sex marriage in early…
-
The Apostle of Voluntary Restrictions: Raymond Duncan
I fell in love with Charity and Sylvia, the subjects of my last book. And I feel seduced by many of the figures of my new research, including problematic characters like Norman Douglas, a pederast as well as an epicure. But I will never fall for Raymond Duncan, who was not only a megalomaniac, but who also preached the…
-
The Rendezvous of Epicures: New York
When I decided to expand my research from a focus on Paris to include Capri as well, I didn’t realize that this path would eventually bring me back home to New York. But Rose O’Neill, designer of the kewpie and former “Queen of Bohemia,” showed me the way. Historians, as a group, tend to be splitters not…
Café Brevoort, Capri, Djuna Barnes, drinking, Floyd Dell, Greenwich Village, Harry Leon Wilson, historicism, Hotel Brevoort, James Huneker, Jell-O, John Glassco, kewpie dolls, Kiki de Montparnasse, Louise Bryant, M. F. K. Fisher, Margaret Sanger, Morley Callaghan, New York City, Nina Hamnett, prohibition, Rose Cecil O’Neill, Thelma Wood, transnational history
Historian. Novelist. Greedy Woman. 