This chapter outlines the history of conscription in the United States and argues that the draft can be used as a tool to decipher public understandings of religion, race, gender, obligation, and the role of government in each historical moment and over time. The answers to the questions of who was included, who was left out, and most importantly, why, reflect larger trends in American society and politics and constitute a clear field of inquiry for the war and society approach to history. The study of conscription is critical to understanding how war radiated out to all levels of American society and how the complex stew of American liberal individualism, republican notions of obligation, gendered and racial hierarchies, and personal psychology impacted American warfighting. In other words, the draft provides a roadmap to Americans’ relationship with and to war.

This article reflects on the state of war and society scholarship in the context of current global conflicts. It argues for bridging the gap between traditional military history and the war and society school to gain a deeper understanding of war's complexities. It uses examples from contemporary conflicts and historical analyses to explore themes such as comradeship, gender, memory, and culture, demonstrating their relevance in interpreting modern warfare. In emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in examining war's multifaceted impact on societies and individuals, it calls for war and society scholars to engage more directly with contemporary issues, applying their insights to foster a more nuanced comprehension of the roots and implications of war.

This chapter argues that throughout his prose works, Wilde demonstrates ambivalence regarding the significance of fashion in relation to flesh, and this chapter traces that ambivalence through texts including The Picture of Dorian Gray, De Profundis, and “The Birthday of the Infanta.” Treating ugliness and beauty, monstrosity and martyrdom, this chapter demonstrates Oscar Wilde’s continued fascination with beautiful flesh that is betrayed as such flesh decays, rots, and becomes loose and baggy, like an ill-fitting garment. Wilde writes against the backdrop of eugenicist discourse, which proves a foil to his aesthetic project while simultaneously animating his response to criminal charges against him for gross indecency. But Wilde also looks to an earlier precedent to work out questions of flesh and fashion, particularly that of baroque painting and sculpture by artists such as Guido Reni and Gianlorenzo Bernini in their representations of the flesh of martyrs. The world remains unsure whether Wilde was a monster or a martyr; this chapter shows that Wilde himself shared those concerns.

Misogynist attacks on women for a purportedly vain and frivolous preoccupation with fashion have proliferated for centuries. This chapter focuses on a feminist response to such rhetoric by a seventeenth century Italian nun, Arcangela Tarabotti. Forced to enter a convent as a teenager, Tarabotti defended women's free enjoyment of fashion and pointed out men’s obsession with adornment. As Eugenia Paulicelli shows, Tarabotti’s theory of fashion offers a feminist critique of masculinity and patriarchy, links women’s right to fashion to their right to education, and articulates the value of women’s work with texts and textiles. Through her engagement with fashion, Tarabotti recasts early modern ideas about gender, as well as distinctions between bodily and intellectual pursuits. She also cannily takes advantage of the ways that her own writing and nuns’ traditional needlework are able to circulate despite their authors’ physical confinement.

This chapter explores Bieral’s ascent in Boston’s sporting world, particularly in boxing and gambling. As a pugilist and promoter, he gained notoriety and respect among working-class men, leveraging his physical prowess and entrepreneurial acumen. The narrative situates prizefighting within a broader culture of honor and individualism, where violence served as both entertainment and social currency. Bieral’s transition from fighter to promoter and casino operator marks his evolution into a figure of influence. The chapter underscores the role of sport in legitimizing urban masculinity and the economic structures that sustained vice industries, revealing how athletic fame often overlapped with criminality.

This chapter traces the early life of Louis Bieral, born in 1814 in Valparaíso, Chile, amid revolutionary upheaval. It explores his ambiguous racial and familial origins and the violent political culture of post-independence Chile, which shaped his understanding of masculinity and authority. Bieral’s exposure to maritime life and urban vice in Valparaíso foreshadowed his later immersion in New York’s underworld. His alleged kidnapping by a whaling captain and subsequent servitude in Brooklyn illustrate the porous boundaries between freedom and coercion in antebellum America. The chapter situates Bieral’s formative years within broader themes of race, labor, and violence, emphasizing the social structures that normalized physical domination and racial ambiguity.

This chapter explores the importance of Ginsberg’s sexuality in the context of his life and work. Aware of his nonnormative sexual desires from an early age, Ginsberg’s lifelong quest for self-understanding was necessarily shaped and informed by poetic explorations into his sexuality, his relationship with which was sometimes fraught. His work bears the imprint of his enduring preoccupation with the variable experiences of queer minds and bodies (often his own) in both straight and queer spaces. The chapter examines selected canonical poems including “A Supermarket in California,” “My Sad Self,” “Howl,” “City Midnight Junk Strains,” and “The Green Automobile,” in order to highlight their generative provocations in the context of a period of prevailing queer invisibility and to emphasize Ginsberg’s legacy as a queer poet in the twenty-first century. The chapter also examines the relationship between Ginsberg’s status as a queer pioneer and some of the more troubling aspects of his in some areas limited and limiting visions and modes of sexuality.

This chapter considers punk’s masculinities, showing how the culture both reaffirmed and challenged gender norms.

Violence is central to popular images of the Middle Ages. Where do clergy fit into this picture? In theory, they were meant to oppose violence and promote peace. But in practice, clergy sometimes took part in warfare. Recent scholarship shows that clergy even engaged in interpersonal violence, and this book pursues this theme further. It will draw on approaches from anthropology, gender and the ‘history of emotions’, which ask fundamental questions: What is violence? How can it be defined as legitimate or illegitimate? Is it innate or learnt behaviour? What purposes does it serve? How far is it gendered? What motivated it? And was the Middle Ages more violent than the present? In applying these approaches, the book seeks to understand how far clergy were separate from the violent culture of laymen around them. Various sources will be used to answer this central question, notably the papal penitentiary registers, church and secular court records and canon law. Legal theory sought to set clergy apart from laymen especially regarding violent crime, so the book will seek to compare this with judicial practice. It thus constitutes a study in legal and social history.

Anthropologists consider interpersonal violence contingent on social and cultural contexts. Quantitative analysis of criminal violence involving English clergy shows that it often arose in communities where both victim and perpetrator lived, notably between parish clergy and parishioners. The reasons for this pattern largely related to clergy’s local position. It was one of power, especially as agents of church courts, e.g., summoning parishioners. This unpopular role exposed clergy to verbal abuse and physical violence, especially when parishioners were charged with sexual offences. This resentment arguably sprang from perceived failure of church courts to correct clergy’s own sexual deviance. This was a major cause of conflict between priests and parishioners, who might take the law into their own hands and even pursue raptus charges against incontinent clergy in royal courts. Clergy also provoked lay resentment for other deviance from the priestly ideal, including arms-bearing, quarrelling and violence. Clergy might be violent with each other, notably to put junior colleagues in their place. Some clergy thus behaved like laymen, especially in pursuing honour-driven violence.

This chapter argues that any critical or historical study of life-narrative, memoir, or autobiography by “gay Latino male” writers in the United States must attend to questions or problems unique to the intersecting fields of queer and Latinx literary studies. At the level of genre, such an analysis must address the decades-long influence of testimonio theory coursing through both Latin American and Latina/o/x literary studies as a destabilizing element in any discussion of genre as a tool for understanding literature, or “the literary” per se, especially in its grounding relationship to any claim to historical knowledge, through the modes of either fiction or nonfiction. At the level of gender, such an analysis must address the recent emergence of the self-interrogating mark of the “x” in Latinx (in the mid-2020s perhaps ceding finally to the “e” in Latine) as the refusal to accept the binary logic of gender as imbedded in the orthography and grammar of conventional Spanish. These considerations destabilize but do not disable the possibility of curating a collection of texts that have since the mid-twentieth century comprised an archive of “Gay Latino American Autobiography.”

Gay American autobiographical writing since the year 2000 became “post-gay,” where “gay” denotes a distinctive, unitary gay male cultural tradition. Post-gay means gay plus: the “post” signifies the movement toward an intersectional model of identity, where other dimensions of culture are integrated with sexuality, and sexual cultures – such as elite gay culture – are transformed by their intersection with black, brown, yellow, and other colors of the rainbow. The 1990s saw the explosive visibility of what was then called the “lesbigay” community in all areas of American public life. That tide ebbed during the second Bush administration, in the backlash against LGBT rights. But the cultural work progressed apace, becoming socially diversified. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen the proliferation of gay US voices. Not simply de-pathologized, and not simply decriminalized, self-consciously gay autobiographical writing has multiplied into as many niche segments as the overall population. These include hyphenated queer Chicano authors, memoirs about drug addiction, and pre-Obergefell gay marriage chronicles, among other intersectional narratives.

The chapter asks how fertility was managed at home in early modern England. Conception and pregnancy were a source of fascination and gossip for elite and middling families, and were seen as having a direct relationship to the godliness of the family line. The stakes, therefore, were high and there was considerable pressure placed on newly married couples to announce that they were expecting shortly after marriage. Medical texts and records of medical practice reveal that men and women often altered their behaviours to ensure they were fertile and able to conceive. Despite this, previous histories have emphasised that early modern people thought only women could be infertile. Challenging this narrative, the chapter finds that although both men and women sought treatments to increase their fertility, male efforts were minimised in paperwork because it was perceived as especially embarrassing and emasculating to not conceive easily.

This interleaf comprises a journey through peri-urban Kiambu, a glimpse of its terrain and inhabitants, as well as an arrival at the homesteads of Ituura, where the book’s narrative is set.