Harry Kellar was an American magician born in Erie, Pa.

How would you expect the Spanish Inquisition to treat a confessed witch? Does the suggestion conjure visions of fire, torture, and lots of murdered women? You aren’t alone - but this is a history we definitely need to unpack.  Transcript for: Suffer a Witch to Live? Religious Conflict and Witchcraft Persecutions; or, No One Expects the Inquisition Researched and written by Averill Earls, PhD…

Today we're exploring one of Texas's most enduring legends - the story of the "Yellow Rose of Texas" and her supposed role in the Battle of San Jacinto. We are going to unravel the myth of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” We will explore the woman at the heart of the tale, Emily D. West, who was a free woman of color working in Texas, and untangle her real life from the Texan myth.

Whispers and Wives' Tales: A History of Women & Gossip in Premodern Society Written by Marissa Rhodes, PhD Recorded by Marissa Rhodes, PhD and Averill Earls, PhD Marissa: On September 9, 1838, a humble woman named Mary Grout descended the stairs outside of her cramped apartment on Rich-street in the poverty-stricken Limehouse district of London. She was visiting her neighbor, Sara Tarrall who lived two floors below her.

Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972.

In 1861, one of the most powerful slave narratives in American history was published under the title, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Harriet Jacobs and edited by the famous aboli…

Your Historians Dig: A History Podcast is a narrative-driven, open access, and accessible digital history project bridging the worlds of popular and academic history with an explicitly feminist per…

 In 1987, the last reported instance of sati threw India into a maelstrom of furious debate and conflict following the ritual suicide of Roop Kanwar after her young husband’s death. Nearly 150 years earlier, British colonial officer Lord William Bentinck passed a prohibition on sati in British India. As Roop Kanwar’s death suggests, British colonial rule did not end the practice of…

The band is getting (back?) together! This July, all four of us will reunite in Western New York for two special Book Talk events. If you can join us, we'd love to see you there! Wednesday, July 9, 6:30pm in the Buffalo Erie Country Public Library, Central Branch. FREE! No registration required. Thursday, July 10, 7-9pm, in the Lily Dale Auditorium! Tickets required

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was an ethically problematic, to say the least, medical research project conducted in Alabama. Officially titled “The Effects of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Ma…

How and when scientists, doctors, and society started conceiving of the physical and emotional components of same-sex desire as a psychiatric condition of the mind? This was neither an ancient belief nor a postmodern (aka, post-1950) one, and it wasn’t an exclusively American phenomenon either. Rather, the classification of same-sex desire as a “disorder” had its roots in the foundations of psychiatry as a profession in the 19th century.