The History News Service, founded in 1996 by Joyce Appleby and James M. Banner, Jr., continues to distribute op-ed pieces that contextualize current events and issues in historical terms to over 300 newspapers and wire services in North America. HNS op-eds have appeared in such newspapers as the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Examiner, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Boston Globe, and similar newspapers around the country. The McClatchy Wire Service, successor to the Knight-Ridder-Tribune Wire Service, also received HNS articles for distribution to its large net of subscribers.
Holding itself out as a syndicate of professional historians, HNS defines that term broadly and accepts submissions (while making no promises) from graduate students and proven independent writers of history as well as from experienced academic scholars. It places no restrictions on the subjects covered nor on the eras or regions from which historical understanding of current matters may be gained. Thus, historians from all fields and of all subjects are invited to submit proposed articles to co-directors Joyce Appleby (appleby-AT-history.ucla.edu) and James M. Bannner, Jr. (jbanner-AT-aya.yale.edu), both of whom should receive texts simultaneously. Full guidelines, examples of how to write op eds, an archive of past HNS op eds, and other information may be found at www.h-net.org/~hns.
Publishing
SUNY Press Announces Indigenous Studies Series
State University of New York Press has announced a new series in Indigenous Studies, the SUNY series in Ethnohistories of Early America (Edited by James Carson, Queen’s University and Greg O’Brien, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro). This series showcases cutting-edge research in the field of ethnohistory, focusing on what is now the United States and Canada from the time of initial contacts between American Indians and Europeans through the era of the early republic United States, ca. 1800.
“Ethnohistory” is defined broadly to be more than American Indian history or the history of Indian-European relations-though that is expected to be the primary area of focus. We will also consider works in the time period on any subset(s) of the North American population that is examined and written about through cultural and/or cross-cultural analysis using ethnohistorical research methodology. To encourage a diverse readership, particularly students, all books in the series will be available simultaneously in hardcover, paperback, and electronic DirectText editions.
Manuscripts and proposals should be sent to:
Dr. Gary Dunham
Executive Director, SUNY Press
194 Washington Ave., Suite 305
Albany, NY 12210
Phone: 518-472-5000 / Fax: 518-472-5038
Direct all questions to:
Professor James Carson
Department of History
Queen’s University
Kingston, ON K7L 3N6 Canada
Professor Greg O’Brien
Department of History
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
PO Box 26170
Greensboro, NC 27402-6170
SAGE Publications Offers Free Access to Journals
SAGE Publications is offering free trial access to their online journals through October 31 by going to this page and registering. The free trail include, among a lot of others, the following titles which historians in and of New York might find interesting:
Accounting History
Crime, Media, Culture
Critique of Anthropology
Cultural Geographies
Feminist Criminology
Feminist Theory
Games and Culture
History of Psychiatry
History of the Human Sciences
Journal of Consumer Culture
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
Journal of Contemporary History
Journal of Family History
Journal of Material Culture
Journal of Peace Research
Journal of Planning History
Journal of Social Archaeology
Journal of Urban History
Labor Studies Journal
Law, Culture and the Humanities
Media, Culture & Society
Media, War & Conflict
New Media & Society
Race & Class
Studies in History
Television & New Media
Theory, Culture & Society
War in History
1840s New York Smut Revisited
Last Tuesday’s Village Voice included a great review (by Tom Robbins) of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York
Like [Al] Goldstein’s Screw, the publishers [of long-forgotten sex rags from the early 1840s] chose titles that got right to the point: The Whip, The Rake, The Libertine, The Flash, and others with even shorter publishing lives. One of these, The New York Sporting Whip, offered a kind of mission statement: “Man is endowed by nature with passions that must be gratified,” the newspaper asserted, “and no blame can be attached to him, who for that purpose occasionally seeks the woman of pleasure.”
The so-called “father of the smutty papers” was William J. Snelling, a hard-drinking Bostoner who dropped out of West Point, hunted with the Dakota Indians, and helped found anti-slavery organizations. Inspired by a sex scandal involving a wealthy theater producer, Snelling launched The Sunday Flash in 1841 together with an eccentric minstrel singer named George Washington Dixon. They didn’t mince words: The theater producer in question, they wrote, was “a hoary leper,” a “Scoundrel whom even Texas vomited from her afflicted bowels.”
The papers were an immediate hit. Newsboys hawked them for six cents apiece at ferry landings and oyster bars. Paid circulation averaged 10,000 to 12,000 per issue. Among the surefire circulation-building devices were in-depth reviews of the city’s hundreds of brothels. “Princess Julia’s Palace of Love,” a story in the June 6, 1841, edition of a weekly called Dixon’s Polyanthos, depicted a popular brothel run by a fashionable madam named Julia Brown: “On ascending the second story, up the splendid steps, you fall in, with apartment No. 1. This room is occupied by Lady Ellen, and a glorious lady she is, with the dark flashing orbs, and full of feeling—so full of intellect that one might stand and gaze, and gaze . . .”
The full review is here.