Digital Highlights: Healthy Plays

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Page from “The Pied Piper of Health.” In 1920, a contest was held in New York City under the guidance of the Child Health Organization to present plays supporting the “Milk and Child Health Campaign.” The resultant plays were donated by their authors, public school teachers, for republication in an anthology called Health Plays for School Children (1921). The volume also includes a reprint of the short pamphlet “Milk: The Master Carpenter” which was meant to be… Continue reading

Digital Highlights: “Sex in Education”

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Education for women was a hot-button topic in the nineteenth century in much the same way that mandatory testing is today. In 1875, Edward H. Clarke capitalised on the public’s interest in this topic with a lecture that he turned into a book, Sex in Education: or, a fair chance for girls. The book makes for entertaining but rather disturbing reading. Continue reading

Digital Connections: Trove

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Trove is a discovery project from the National Library of Australia, aggregating a wide variety of content all to do with Australian history. The Library itself describes Trove as “supports the discovery and annotation of items in Australian collections.  The term “Australian collections” encompasses libraries, archives, university repositories and major online collections such as biographical databases, digitised book collections and digitised newspaper collections.” Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Water and Politics

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One of the most popular alternative cures in the nineteenth century involved water — lots of water. Balneology, balneotherapy, or “the cold water cure” was popular on mainland Europe, in England, and in the United States. Spas flourished in England, for example, and scientist Charles Darwin credited the cold water cure with the recreation of his system after serious digestive problems left him almost prostrate and unable to work. In Six Months at Graefenberg, H.C. Wright… Continue reading