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The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians awards prizes each year to female historians or historians who identify as a woman for both books and articles. The 2023 article in the fields of the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality Honorable Mention was...

By Paul A. Lombardo I began my book Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell, with an account of my introduction to the Buck case in 1980, when I saw a newspaper story about a lawsuit brought by someone who had been...

By Lisa T. Sarasohn Let’s be perfectly clear: I despise bugs, even the supposedly socially useful ones, like bees or spiders. And I particularly don’t like the nefarious ones that I feature in my book, Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of...

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association has been called “the most important book of the twentieth century.” While this evaluation is debatable, the history of the DSM is certainly one of the most interesting stories in...

When I first published Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex in 2009, not many people had even heard of “intersex” (atypical development of genitals, chromosomes, hormones and gonads), though of course individuals have always been born with these...

I was approached by my editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press about preparing a revised second edition of my book The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria. The book was the first volume in the Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease...

I met Jeanne Simons, the founder of the Linwood Children's Center for Autistic Children in Ellicott City in 1983, when I was entrusted with the job to help tease out and describe the different elements of the methods she had developed to successfully educate...

When I was writing The Collectors of Lost Souls (2008), the picaresque yet tragic story of investigations of the lethal neurological disorder called kuru, the ethics of this scientific enterprise were much on my mind. As the narrative began to cohere and...

The two of us are sisters – Margaret is a historian, Wanda a gynecologist – and we have been writing about the history of infertility, reproductive sexuality, and reproductive medicine for close to three decades now. In our new book, The Pursuit of Parenthood...

There is a story that fatness, widespread at least among modern historians, became a morally and discredited condition pretty recently – perhaps in the 1980s, when female models began to grow thinner and male models more muscular. Before that was the era of...