When you think of a shtetl, what comes to mind? For many it might be Anatevka of “Fiddler on the Roof” fame, for others it might be the brief glimpse you get of the Mousekewitz family home at the beginning of “An American Tail” or the shtetl too small for a name in “When the… Continue reading The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
“The Worst Journey in the World” tells the story of the Terra Nova expedition, Robert Falcon Scott’s final attempt to reach the South Pole. The memoir of expedition survivor Apsley Cherry-Garrard, it has been a source of fascination for many, including artist Sarah Airriess, who has now given us a lovingly drawn and carefully researched… Continue reading The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard adapted by Sarah Airriess
Wow, wow, wow, I’ve had a lot going on recently, last quarter I was fretting about not having enough reading to make a post, now I have… almost too much. That is because I’ve picked up a number of epistolary substack stories being done like Dracula Daily and I took an online course on Tolkien… Continue reading Behind the Scenes – Summer 2022
I really didn’t know what to expect from this book. Despite my longstanding love of vampires, I’ve read more vampire fiction and folklore than I have any academia on the subject. Having read it now, my ultimate assessment is that if you're looking for an introduction to the history of vampires as they exist today… Continue reading The Rise of the Vampire by Erik Butler
“The Sawbones Book” has been revised and expanded for 2020 and we all know what that means. No, not a lot of COVID-19 talk, but an expanded infectious disease section that includes historical pandemics, epidemics and global panics feat. some notes about how we’re totally handling this pandemic so much better than we did in… Continue reading The Sawbones Book: The Horrifying, Hilarious Road to Modern Medicine (expanded edition) by Justin and Dr. Syndee McElroy
I was really excited when I first heard about “Freiheit! The White Rose Graphic Novel,” in part because it’s a part of World War II history that I’ve been interested in, but haven’t had the opportunity to read much about. I’d previously read several short articles about Sophie Scholl—one of the book’s lead protagonists—but they… Continue reading Freiheit! The White Rose Graphic Novel by Andrea Grosso Ciponte
The first thing I learned reading this was that I’m very out of practice when it comes to reading academic theory. The second was that I need to broaden the academic theory I read. Thankfully, “Black on Both Sides” has a deliciously robust bibliography which I have marked up for future reading. Now I will… Continue reading Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton
If you’re interested in the gay history of the 19th century, but have absolutely no idea where to begin, “Strangers” is a really solid place to start. It not only covers the whole of the 19th century (and swings into the 20th century), but unlike many books in the field, it goes out of it’s… Continue reading Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb
While I did not go to school to become a historian, I’ve always loved history and 9 times out of 10 it winds up playing an important role in what I do, be it my queer studies or simply fan projects. It may not come as a surprise, considering my recent posts about “The Terror,” that I have fallen down a research rabbit hole. The sexy thing about working with texts from the 1800s is that sometimes they’re freely available to read online, the unsexy thing is that I vastly prefer reading hard copy books and don’t always do well reading books on a computer screen. Enter on demand book printing.
So you watched “The Terror” and now you don’t know what to do with yourself. Well, congratulations, you have like so much content available to you, both academic and historical and fannish, you’re gonna have a great time. I have compiled a handy dandy guide to learning about the Franklin expedition and/or participating in Terror… Continue reading The Terror: History and Fan Works
Snap Book Reviews 