The following is my review of Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History by Susanna Lee, as published in Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy in March 2023. Susanna Lee’s Detectives in the Shadows is an incisive, entertaining jaunt through the hard-boiled genre from its pulp-fiction origins to the present. Lee, Professor…
Louise Brooks arrived in New York in 1922, a fifteen-year-old from Kansas with a chaperone to study dance with the Denishawn company. Within three years she transformed herself into the Jazz Age icon that persists in popular memory. Rereading Louise Brooks’s writing of her early years in New York City, published as Chapter One in…
The telephone and “Hello Girls” were wildly disruptive when they arrived at the end of the 19th century. They were radical innovations that brought change, not least for single women, both in the workplace and in the male imagination. Women dominated the ranks of telephone operators early on, starting with Emma M. Nutt in 1878…
Autistic characters—both in stories and in real life—have always existed. What we now call autism has long been part of the human condition, even though medicine only began identifying the particular set of physical and mental traits associated with it within the last 100 years. This issue has special relevance to me. I have an…
Women doctors now make up about 60 percent of practitioners under 35. The situation was very different in the past. No Women Doctors Need Apply In her book “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply”: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975, Mary Roth Walsh recounts the terrible difficulty women faced in studying medicine and in…
Posted on February 20, 2020 by Bill LeFurgy A viral song elbowed sex into American popular culture during the early years of the twentieth century. I learned more about this while researching my historical mystery book Into the Suffering City, which is set in 1909 Baltimore. Ragtime Music Sets the Stage for Controversial Songs Romance…