Since interest in the Nutshells has continued to grow, I thought I’d do a brief roundup of my contribution to recent web articles and blog posts (includes photos I’ve shared and links): Wellcome Collection Blog: “Finding the Truth in a Nutshell,” by Erin N. Bush Fangirl Nation: Mistress of Death Interview with Erin N. Bush Mental…
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In Brief: The Digital Past – Fall 2014
This semester, I’ve adjusted my H390 – Digital Past syllabus to focus student projects on Gilded Age/Progressive Era Chicago. My last two classes, which consisted of mostly non-majors, struggled with the breadth of my “pick a topic in history” final project instructions. I also found that since I am not an expert on all possible…
Capital Cases in 1850s Virginia
This semester, I’m taking my very last course in the PhD program–the Doctoral Research Seminar. The purpose of the course is to research and write a substantial paper related to our dissertations. I’ve chosen to explore the circumstances of capital cases involving women in Virginia in the 1850s. As seen in this graph, my research…
Reflections on Discipline and Punishment
Edward Ayers, Vengeance & Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (1984) Edward Ayers, in Vengeance & Justice, explores the rates and types of crime patterns in the South. Broadly, he is taking a quantitative approach to understand how crime and punishment fit together, how they changed before and after the Civil War,…
Reflections on Institutions: Female Prisons & Asylums
Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums & Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2008) Benjamin Reiss, in Theaters of Madness, questions the tensions between confinement and liberty in the early republic through an analysis of the cultural products relating to the asylum. He uses the writings of nineteenth-century literary figures and asylum patients to uncover the character of…
Reflections on Homicide in America
This week, we’re evaluating two vastly different views on homicide in America–one from the perspective of the cultural work done to explain it and an another from the broad statistics and trends associated with the crime. These readings offer two approaches to how to balance very broad questions that attempt to identify patterns with the…