When Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine in 1565, his New World survival kit included gambling, liquor and ladies for hire. For the next four hundred years, these three industries were vital in keeping the city financially afloat. With the cooperation of law enforcement and politicians, St. Augustine's madams, bootleggers and high-rollers created a veritable Riviera where tourists, especially the wealthy, could indulge in almost every vice and still bring the family along for a wholesome vacation picking oranges and gawking at alligators. Join historian Ann Colby's tour of spots not on the standard tourist map to discover hidden-in-plain-sight bordellos, speakeasies, casinos and the occasional opium den.
Prohibition was imposed by eager temperance movements organizers who sought to shape public behavior through alcoholic beverage control in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The success of reformers' efforts resulted in National Prohibition in America from 1920 to 1933, but it also resulted in a thriving illegal business in the manufacture and distribution of illegal liquor. The history of Prohibition and the resulting illegal drinking is frequently told through the lens of crime and violence in Chicago and other major East Coast cities. Often neglected are the effects of Prohibition on the Western part of the United States and how Westerners rose to the challenge of avoiding the consequences of illegal drinking. Illegal liquor was imported from abroad, made in stills using strange ingredients that were sometimes poisonous to the unlucky drinker. This history includes stories ranging from serious to quirky, and provides an entertaining account of how misguided efforts resulted in numerous unintended consequences.
The cliche is that prostitution is the oldest profession. Isn't it time that the subject received a full reference treatment? This major 2-volume set is the first to treat in an inclusive reference what is usually considered a societal failing and the underside of sexuality and economic survival. The A-to-Z encyclopedia offers wide-ranging entries related to prostitution and the sex industry, past and present, both worldwide (mostly in the West) and in the United States. The topic of prostitution has high-interest appeal across disciplines, and the narrative entries illuminate literature, art, law, medicine, economics, politics, women's studies, religion, sociology, sexuality, film, popular culture, public health, nonfiction, American and world history, business, gender, media, education, crime, race, technology, performing arts, family, social work, social mores, pornography, the military, tourism, child labor, and more. It is targeted to the general reader, who will gain useful insight into the human race through time via its sex industry and prostitution. An introduction overviews the scope of prostitution from the earliest historical records, including the Bible. User-friendly lists that are alphabetically and topically arranged help the reader find entries of interest, as does the comprehensive index. A chronology proffers significant dates related to the topic. Each entry is signed and has suggestions for further reading. Sample entries: Abolition; Actresses; Augustine, Saint; Barr, Candy; Bible; Camp Followers; Chamberlain-Kahn Bill of 1918; Child Prostitution; Clothing, Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869; Crime; Debby Doesn't Do It for Free; Dickens, Charles; Devadasi; Entrapment; Fallen Woman Trope; Feminism; Films, Cult; Five Points; Free Love; Geisha; Globalization; Guidebooks; Hip-Hop; HIV/AIDS and the Prostitution Rights Movement; Human Rights; Incest; Internet; Jack the Ripper; Kama Sutra; League of Nations; Lulu; Male Stripping; Mann Act; Mayhew, Henry; Memoirs; Migration and Mobility; Nazi Germany; Poetry; Purity Movements; R&R; Religion; Salvation Army; Scapegoating; Slang; Storyville; Temporary Marriage; Unions; Venice; Window Prostitution.
Often overlooked, disregarded, or hidden from historical accounts due to its racy connotations, the prostitution industry was one of the most important factors in the development of the American West. The “oldest profession” fueled the economies of camps, towns, and cities as they grew.Sex workers, from common prostitutes to reigning madams such as Anna Wilson, Maggie Wood, and Big Ann Wynne, defied social norms to make sure their hometowns, and they themselves, were successful. Their reasons for entering the life varied, from women who could find no other way to make money to those who desired independence and wealth. In return they were ostracized, criticized, and subject to fines, jail, disease, drug addiction, violence, and unwanted pregnancies. While their success stories are many, others failed in their endeavors, their names buried with them when they died. Behind Brothel Doors chronicles the history of the nineteenth-century sex work industry in the Great Plains states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.
In this volume the borders of North America serve as central locations for examining the consequences of globalization as it intersects with hegemonic spaces and ideas, national territorialism, and opportunities for—or restrictions on—mobility. The authors of the essays in this collection warn against falling victim to the myth of nation-states engaging in a valiant struggle against transnational flows of crime and vice. They take a long historical perspective, from Mesoamerican counterfeits of cacao beans used as currency to cattle rustling to human trafficking; from Canada’s and Mexico’s different approaches to the illegality of liquor in the United States during Prohibition to contemporary case studies of the transnational movement of people, crime, narcotics, vice, and even ideas. By studying the historical flows of contraband and vice across North American borders, the contributors seek to bring a greater understanding of borderlanders, the actual agents of historical change who often remain on the periphery of most historical analyses that focus on the state or on policy. To examine the political, economic, and social shifts resulting from the transnational movement of goods, people, and ideas, these contributions employ the analytical categories of race, class, modernity, and gender that underlie this evolution. Chapters focus on the ways power relations created opportunities for engaging in “deviance,” thus questioning the constructs of economic reality versus concepts of criminal behavior. Looking through the lens of transnational flows of contraband and vice, the authors develop a new understanding of nation, immigration, modernization, globalization, consumer society, and border culture.
During the early twentieth century, a diverse group of African American women carved out unique niches for themselves within New York City's expansive informal economy. LaShawn Harris illuminates the labor patterns and economic activity of three perennials within this kaleidoscope of underground industry: sex work, numbers running for gambling enterprises, and the supernatural consulting business. Mining police and prison records, newspaper accounts, and period literature, Harris teases out answers to essential questions about these women and their working lives. She also offers a surprising revelation, arguing that the burgeoning underground economy served as a catalyst in working-class black women TMs creation of the employment opportunities, occupational identities, and survival strategies that provided them with financial stability and a sense of labor autonomy and mobility. At the same time, urban black women, all striving for economic and social prospects and pleasures, experienced the conspicuous and hidden dangers associated with newfound labor opportunities.
Alison Bass weaves the true stories of sex workers with the latest research on prostitution into a gripping journalistic account of how women (and some men) navigate a culture that routinely accepts the implicit exchange of sex for money, status, or even a good meal, but imposes heavy penalties on those who make such bargains explicit. Along the way, Bass examines why an increasing number of middle-class white women choose to become sex workers and explores how prostitution has become a thriving industry in the twenty-first-century global economy. Situating her book in American history more broadly, she also discusses the impact of the sexual revolution, the rise of the Nevada brothels, and the growing war on sex trafficking after 9/11. Drawing on recent studies that show lower rates of violence and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, in regions where adult prostitution is legal and regulated, Bass makes a powerful case for decriminalizing sex work. Through comparisons of the impact of criminalization vs. decriminalization in other countries, her book offers strategies for making prostitution safer for American sex workers and the communities in which they dwell. This riveting assessment of how U.S. anti-prostitution laws harm the public health and safety of sex workers and other citizens - and affect larger societal attitudes toward women - will interest feminists, sociologists, lawyers, health-care professionals, and policy makers. The book also will appeal to anyone with an interest in American history and our society's evolving attitudes toward sexuality and marriage.
Chicago’s reputation for corruption is the basis of local and national folklore and humor. Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago, 1833–2003 unfolds the city’s notorious history of corruption and the countervailing reform struggles that largely failed to clean it up. More than a regional history of crime in politics, this wide-ranging account of governmental malfeasances traces ongoing public corruption and reform to its nineteenth-century democratic roots. Former Chicago journalist James L. Merriner reveals the battles between corrupt politicos and ardent reformers to be expressions of conflicting class, ethnic, and religious values. From Chicago’s earliest years in the 1830s, the city welcomed dollar-chasing businessmen and politicians, swiftly followed by reformers who strived to clean up the attendant corruption. Reformers in Chicago were called “goo goos,” a derisive epithet short for “good-government types.” Grafters and Goo Goos contends a certain synergy defined the relationship between corruption and reform. Politicians and reformers often behaved similarly, their separate ambitions merging into a conjoined politics of interdependency wherein the line between heroes and villains grew increasingly faint. The real story, asserts Merriner, has less to do with right against wrong than it does with the ways the cultural backgrounds of politicians and reformers steered their own agendas, animating and defining each other by their opposition. Drawing on original and archival research, Merriner identifies constants in the struggle between corruption and reform amid a welter of changing social circumstances and customs—decades of alternating war and peace, hardships and prosperity. Three areas of reform and resistance are identified: structural reform of the political system to promote honesty and efficiency, social reform to provide justice to the lower classes, and moral reform to combat vice. “In the matter of corruption and reform, the constants might be stronger than the variables,” writes Merriner in the Preface. “The players, rules, and scorekeepers change, but not the essential game.” Complemented by eighteen illustrations, Grafters and Goo Goos is rife with shocking and amusing anecdotes and peppered with the personalities of famous muckrakers, bootleggers, mayors, and mobsters. While other studies have profiled infamous Chicago corruption cases and figures such as Al Capone and Richard J. Daley, this is the first to provide an overview appropriate for historians and general readers alike. In examining Chicago’s notorious saga of corruption and reform against a backdrop of social history, Merriner calls attention to our constant problems of both civic and national corruption and contributes to larger discussions about the American experiment of democratic self-government.
Kentucky Bluegrass Country by R. Gerald Alvey Horse breeding, the cultures of tobacco and bourbon, the forms of architecture, the codes of the hunt, the traditions of gambling and dueling, convivial celebrations, regional foodways-all of these are ingredients in the folklife of the Inner Bluegrass Region that is the focus of this fascinating book. R. Gerald Alvey (retired) was a professor of folklore and English at the University of Kentucky.
