Nicholas L Syrett
Biographic Data
| ID | 252162 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas L Syrett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas L |
| FAMILY NAME | Syrett |
| SIGNATURE | SYRETT N L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kansas |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The History and Legacy of Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws
The figure of Anthony Comstock may seem like an odd historical relic: a repressed, puritanical, anti-sex reformer from a bygone past. And yet, because his namesake act has been revived as a potential strategy for limiting access to reproductive healthcare, Comstock is no joke. Today, some Americans see the Comstock Act, passed by Congress in 1873, as a pathway to banning abortion and other reproductive care, effectively jettisoning any need for n…
Anthony Comstock, Abortion, and the Arrest of Madame Restell
Anthony Comstock arrested many people, but perhaps none was so famous as Madame Restell, whom he arrested on February 11, 1878, for selling contraceptives and abortifacients. While Comstock’s actions had led to the arrest of other celebrated personae in the past – including Victoria Woodhull, her second husband James Blood, and her sister, Tennessee Claflin in 1872 – Restell’s arrest and looming trial led her to commit suicide by slitting her thr…
Rethinking Youth and Transactional Sex
Rethinking Youth and Transactional Sex. Un article de la revue Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada (Volume 32, numéro 2, 2022, p. 1-166) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
John Ibson. Men without Maps
Journal Article John Ibson. Men without Maps: Some Gay Males of the Generation before Stonewall. Get access John Ibson. Men without Maps: Some Gay Males of the Generation before Stonewall. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. 176. Paper $30.00. Nicholas L. Syrett Nicholas L. Syrett University of Kansas, US Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, V…
Frontiers of Boyhood
The fact that Martin Woodside’s book appears in the William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West should give some clue that the book is more focused on Buffalo Bill than its title alone would indicate. Woodside demonstrates that the space of the American frontier—mostly as imagined in children’s literature, dime novels, Wild West shows, and children’s toys—was a key site for the negotiation of boyhood at the turn of the …
Introduction to “Sex across the Ages
The introduction situates the historiography on queer intergenerational sex in the realm of scholarship on queer history, the history of childhood, and the literature on the significance of chronological age. It lays out three broad schemas that have organized queer intergenerational sex—looking at it as a phallic economy where boys submitted to older men in ways that were akin to women; as a function of pederastic or pedophilic desires; and as a…
Strange Bedfellows
The title of Alison Lefkovitz’s compelling new book does not quite convey just how wide-ranging her subject really is. Rather than a study of how marriages changed (or didn’t) during the 1960s and ’70 s, Lefkovitz is interested in the legal repercussions of feminist challenges to the remnants of coverture during that period. Broadly speaking, she argues that feminists who successfully transformed marriage law paved the way for other groups of peo…
Age and the Construction of Gendered and Raced Citizenship in the United States
Focusing on the United States, Field and Syrett argue that the supposed universality of chronological age masks the processes through which legislators and government officials relied upon age to reinforce inequalities rooted in coverture and chattel slavery. Two case studies reveal how bureaucratic and legislative age requirements functioned in tandem to deny equal citizenship to women and formerly enslaved people. During the Civil War, Congress…
Marcia A. Zug, Buying a Bride
Deregulating Desire
Deregulating Desire is a history of flight attendant unions from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century. It highlights the connections between labor activism and the desires of flight attendants, many of them queer and single people, to sustain themselves and their kin. Ryan Patrick Murphy argues that flight attendants built a workplace rights movement out of feminist and gay liberationist principles, and that they continue to foregroun…
Clare Virginia Eby. Until Choice Do Us Part
Until Choice Do Us Part is a persuasive and bracingly written account of marriage reform during the Progressive Era. Focusing on a group of novelists, academics, and other public intellectuals, Clare Virginia Eby argues that these reformers constituted a vital and overlooked variety of Progressive reform, targeting not public institutions, but rather relationships between people. They believed that marriage could be transformed for the betterment…
Mobility, Circulation, and Correspondence
This article explores how letters written by white men living in the Midwest reveal the relation between their location and their strategies to realize queer social and sexual lives from the 1930s through the 1950s. In particular I demonstrate how their relative isolation encouraged them to use correspondence for community formation and travel as a way to meet other men, emphasizing the circular nature of that travel (rather than one-way movement…
Lord of a Hawaiian Island”
This case study of a white male couple (Robert and John Gregg Allerton) on Kaua‘i from the 1930s through the 1960s investigates how their colonization of the island has tended to be erased in accounts that highlight both the supposed acceptance of their homosexuality by the island’s residents and, in turn, the couple’s generous philanthropy. Set against this narrative of what Mary Louise Pratt has called “anti-conquest,” I demonstrate that the Al…
Deregulating Desire
Deregulating Desire is a history of flight attendant unions from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century. It highlights the connections between labor activism and the desires of flight attendants, many of them queer and single people, to sustain themselves and their kin. Ryan Patrick Murphy argues that flight attendants built a workplace rights movement out of feminist and gay liberationist principles, and that they continue to foregroun…
Mobility, Circulation, and Correspondence
This article explores how letters written by white men living in the Midwest reveal the relation between their location and their strategies to realize queer social and sexual lives from the 1930s through the 1950s. In particular I demonstrate how their relative isolation encouraged them to use correspondence for community formation and travel as a way to meet other men, emphasizing the circular nature of that travel (rather than one-way movement…
Lord of a Hawaiian Island”
This case study of a white male couple (Robert and John Gregg Allerton) on Kaua‘i from the 1930s through the 1960s investigates how their colonization of the island has tended to be erased in accounts that highlight both the supposed acceptance of their homosexuality by the island’s residents and, in turn, the couple’s generous philanthropy. Set against this narrative of what Mary Louise Pratt has called “anti-conquest,” I demonstrate that the Al…
Mobility, Circulation, and Correspondence
This article explores how letters written by white men living in the Midwest reveal the relation between their location and their strategies to realize queer social and sexual lives from the 1930s through the 1950s. In particular I demonstrate how their relative isolation encouraged them to use correspondence for community formation and travel as a way to meet other men, emphasizing the circular nature of that travel (rather than one-way movement…
Clare Virginia Eby. Until Choice Do Us Part
Until Choice Do Us Part is a persuasive and bracingly written account of marriage reform during the Progressive Era. Focusing on a group of novelists, academics, and other public intellectuals, Clare Virginia Eby argues that these reformers constituted a vital and overlooked variety of Progressive reform, targeting not public institutions, but rather relationships between people. They believed that marriage could be transformed for the betterment…
Deregulating Desire
Deregulating Desire is a history of flight attendant unions from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century. It highlights the connections between labor activism and the desires of flight attendants, many of them queer and single people, to sustain themselves and their kin. Ryan Patrick Murphy argues that flight attendants built a workplace rights movement out of feminist and gay liberationist principles, and that they continue to foregroun…
Marcia A. Zug, Buying a Bride
Introduction to “Sex across the Ages
The introduction situates the historiography on queer intergenerational sex in the realm of scholarship on queer history, the history of childhood, and the literature on the significance of chronological age. It lays out three broad schemas that have organized queer intergenerational sex—looking at it as a phallic economy where boys submitted to older men in ways that were akin to women; as a function of pederastic or pedophilic desires; and as a…
Strange Bedfellows
The title of Alison Lefkovitz’s compelling new book does not quite convey just how wide-ranging her subject really is. Rather than a study of how marriages changed (or didn’t) during the 1960s and ’70 s, Lefkovitz is interested in the legal repercussions of feminist challenges to the remnants of coverture during that period. Broadly speaking, she argues that feminists who successfully transformed marriage law paved the way for other groups of peo…
Age and the Construction of Gendered and Raced Citizenship in the United States
Focusing on the United States, Field and Syrett argue that the supposed universality of chronological age masks the processes through which legislators and government officials relied upon age to reinforce inequalities rooted in coverture and chattel slavery. Two case studies reveal how bureaucratic and legislative age requirements functioned in tandem to deny equal citizenship to women and formerly enslaved people. During the Civil War, Congress…
Frontiers of Boyhood
The fact that Martin Woodside’s book appears in the William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West should give some clue that the book is more focused on Buffalo Bill than its title alone would indicate. Woodside demonstrates that the space of the American frontier—mostly as imagined in children’s literature, dime novels, Wild West shows, and children’s toys—was a key site for the negotiation of boyhood at the turn of the …
Rethinking Youth and Transactional Sex
Rethinking Youth and Transactional Sex. Un article de la revue Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada (Volume 32, numéro 2, 2022, p. 1-166) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
John Ibson. Men without Maps
Journal Article John Ibson. Men without Maps: Some Gay Males of the Generation before Stonewall. Get access John Ibson. Men without Maps: Some Gay Males of the Generation before Stonewall. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. 176. Paper $30.00. Nicholas L. Syrett Nicholas L. Syrett University of Kansas, US Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, V…
The History and Legacy of Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws
The figure of Anthony Comstock may seem like an odd historical relic: a repressed, puritanical, anti-sex reformer from a bygone past. And yet, because his namesake act has been revived as a potential strategy for limiting access to reproductive healthcare, Comstock is no joke. Today, some Americans see the Comstock Act, passed by Congress in 1873, as a pathway to banning abortion and other reproductive care, effectively jettisoning any need for n…
Anthony Comstock, Abortion, and the Arrest of Madame Restell
Anthony Comstock arrested many people, but perhaps none was so famous as Madame Restell, whom he arrested on February 11, 1878, for selling contraceptives and abortifacients. While Comstock’s actions had led to the arrest of other celebrated personae in the past – including Victoria Woodhull, her second husband James Blood, and her sister, Tennessee Claflin in 1872 – Restell’s arrest and looming trial led her to commit suicide by slitting her thr…
Sociology (9 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · History (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Politics (3 works) · Psychology (3 works)