Rachel Louise Moran

Modern History of the Body 

Fall 2022  
M/W 2-3:20pm
Wooten 121

Course Description

We are embodied creatures – creatures with bodies, who experience the world through our physical form. Our senses and emotions, our sickness and health, our size, shape, sex, and color, are all part of our interactions with the world. This is true for historical actors as well, of course – they did not simply think rationally about the world, but also experienced it through hunger, through pain and pleasure, through disability, through reproduction and childbirth, and through illness. Yet the lived reality of historical actors is so often stripped from the historical record. This course examines the history of body in a primarily U.S. context, supplemented with some more global content. We will look at what we lose when we lose the body in historical writing, and examine different ways historians have sought to bring the body back into our picture. In the process, we will also see just what we learn through the physical experiences of modern history.  

Required Texts

  • All materials are on Canvas 

Optional Supplementary Texts  

  • For help with writing and reading history, as well as with citations, you might use Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, Bedford/St. Martin’s, any edition.  This is especially useful to keep around if you are a history major.
  • For a refresher on the U.S. history survey, the American Yawp – http://www.americanyawp.com – is an open access textbook that can provide helpful background if we are reading about a time period or historical event you are unfamiliar with.

Assignments and Grades

Prep assignments (3 questions and a fascinating bit) – 8 x 40 points each = 320

(there are 10 offered, so you can skip 2 with no penalty. 4 bonus points for any     over the required 8.)

Final Exits – 20 x 12 points each = 240

(there are 24 offered, so you can miss 4 with no penalty. 2 bonus points for any    over the required 20.)

Unessay/essay assignment – 


            Proposal – 80 points

List of Sources – 80 points
Presentation – 130 points
Essay or unessay – 150 points

——-

= 1000 points total

More information on each assignment is available on Canvas, and will also be discussed in class as it comes up. The unessay (or essay) assignment focuses on researching an object related to the history of the body: the thermometer, the afro pick, the bathroom scale, whitening cream…etc….and making a project or writing a paper based on your research. We will spend time in class discussing the project and research strategies.

Grading Scale (900+ = A; 800-899 = B; 700-799 = C, 600-699 = D, Under 500 = F)

Learning Objectives  

  • You will be able to define, historicize and question concepts including body, body weight, death, birth, sex, gender, and disability 
  • You will be familiar with terms like “embodiment,” “dualism,” and “discipline,” and be able to apply them to more traditional historical narratives  
  • You will be able to critically read and assess a variety of sources of health information, from academic works to personal essays to documentaries, and from news stories to social media to advertisements.  
  • You will be able to connect issues of the historical body to the contemporary body, and produce critiques of contemporary media discussions that use and/or fetishize the body  

Course Schedule 

subject to change, but always with warning

Week 1 – Introduction to the History of the Body

Mon, Aug 29

Wed, Aug 31

  • Read Kathleen Brown, “Atlantic Crossings,” from Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America
  • Exit #1 in class

Week 2 – Teeth, and the Inequalities of the Body

Mon, Sept 5

  • Labor Day – NO CLASS

Wed, Sept 7

  • Read excerpts from Mary Otto, Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, chapters: “The Birth of American Dentistry” and “Separate Lives”
  • Submit three questions and one fascinating bit (on Canvas, by Wed at 11am) – Prep #1
  • Exit #2 in class

Week 3 – Making Race in the 19th Century

Mon, Sept. 12

  • Read Rebecca Herzig, “The Hairless Indian: Savagery and Civility before the Civil War,” fromPlucked: A History of Hair Removal
  • Submit three questions and one fascinating bit (on Canvas, by Mon at 11am) – Prep #2
  • Exit #3 in class

Wed, Sept. 14

  • Read Rana Hogarth, “Black Immunity and Yellow Fever in the American Atlantic,” from Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840.
  • Exit #4 in class

Week 4 – Blood, Race, and Metaphors of the Body

Mon, Sept 19

  • Read Thomas A. Guglielmo, “Red Cross, Double Cross: Race and America’s World War II-Era Blood Donor Service”
  • Submit three questions and one fascinating bit (on Canvas, by Mon at 11am) – Prep #3
  • Exit #5 in class

Wed, Sept 21

  • Read Michael Lambert, “How Grandma Kate Lost Her Cherokee Blood”
  • Listen to podcast, “So What Exactly is Blood Quantum?” (NPR – Codeswitch – 21 minutes)
  • Exit #6 in class

Week 5 – Disability History – I

Mon, Sept. 26

  • NO CLASS SESSION (Rosh Hashana)
  • Watch Through Deaf Eyes (documentary, link on Canvas)
  • Exit #7 on Canvas

Wed, Sept. 28

  • Read Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi, “The Hearing Aid’s Pursuit of Invisibility” (The Atlantic)
  • Submit three questions and one fascinating bit from Through Deaf Eyes and the Virdi-Dhesi (on Canvas, by Wed at 11am) – Prep #4
  • Exit #8 in class

Week 6 – Writing the Body

Mon, Oct. 3

  • No reading – in class discussion of essay/unessay project and the proposal
  • Exit #9 in class

Wed., Oct. 5

  • NO CLASS SESSION (Yom Kippur)
  • Listen to podcast, “Is Beauty in the Eye of the Colonizer?” (NPR – Codeswitch – 47 minutes)
  • Exit #10 on canvas


Week 7 – Disability History – II

Mon, Oct. 10

  • Read Frank Costigliola, “Roosevelt’s Body and National Power”
  • Read Neely Tucker, “A Wheelchair Gains a Place at FDR Memorial” (Washington Post)
  • Submit three questions and one fascinating bit (on Canvas, by Mon at 11am) – Prep #5
  • Exit #11 in class

Wed, Oct. 12.

  • Read Leslie J. Reagan, “Monstrous Births, Birth Defects, Unusual Anatomy, and Disability in Europe and North America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability History
  • Proposal due, by Wed at 11pm (night!)
  • Exit #12 in class

Week 8 – Masculinity and the Gendered Body

Mon, Oct. 17

  • Read Christopher Oldstone-Moore, “Mustaches and Masculine Codes in Early Twentieth-Century America”
  • Submit three questions and one fascinating bit (on Canvas, by Mon at 11am) – Prep #6
  • Exit #13 in class

Wed, Oct. 19

  • Read Wesley Morris, “My Mustache, Myself” (New York Times)
  • In class discussion of research strategies
  • Exit #14 in class

Week 9 – Fat Politics

Mon, Oct 24 

  • Read Sabrina Strings, “Obese Black Women as ‘Social Dead Weight’: Reinventing the Diseased Black Woman,” from Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
  • Submit three questions and one fascinating bit (on Canvas, by Mon at 11am) – Prep #7
  • Exit #15 in class

Wed, Oct 26

  • Read Aubrey Gordon, “Introduction” and “Becoming an Epidemic,” from What We Don’t Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Fat
  • Exit #16 in class

Week 10 – Reproduction

Mon, Oct 31

  • Read Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Abortion and Gender Relations in Eighteenth-Century New England”
  • Read Leslie Reagan, “Crossing the Border for Abortions in the 1960s” 
  • Submit three questions and one fascinating bit (on Canvas, by Mon at 11am) – Prep #8
  • Exit #17 in class

Wed, Nov 2

  • Source list for your paper/unessay due
  • Exit #18 in class


Week 11 – Menstruation and Menopause

Mon, Nov. 7

  • Read Lara Freidenfelds, “Before ‘Modern’ Menstrual Management,” from The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America
  • Submit three questions and one fascinating bit (on Canvas, by Mon at 11am) – Prep #9
  • Exit #19 in class

Wed, Nov. 9

  • Read Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, “‘Educate Yourself’: Consumer Information about Menopause and Hormone Replacement therapy,” from Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History
  • Exit #20 in class

Week 12  – Bodies Beyond Binaries 

Mon, Nov. 14

  • Read Elizabeth Reis, “Impossible Hermaphrodites: Intersex in America, 1620-1960”
  • Submit three questions and one fascinating bit (on Canvas, by Mon at 11am) – Prep #10
  • Exit #21 in class

Wed, Nov. 16

  • Read Joanne Meyerowitz, “Transforming Sex: Christine Jorgenson in the Postwar US”
  • Exit #22 in class

Week 13  – Genetic Bodies

Mon, Nov. 21

  • Read Alondra Nelson, “Bio Science: Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry”
  • Exit #23 in class

Wed, Nov. 23

  • NO CLASS

Week 14 –  Bodies Reimagined

Mon, Nov. 28

  • Sharrona Pearl, “Change Your Face, Change Your Life? Prison Plastic Surgery as a Way to Reduce Recidivism”
  • Exit #24 in class

Wed, Nov. 30

  • Topic TBD – students vote

Week 15 – Presentations 

Mon, Dec. 5

  • Presentations

Wed, Dec. 7

  • Presentations

Final 

Due Monday, Dec. 12 at 11:59pm