Lynn Sacco

World History

This Day In History

Nov. 25 – In 1986, the Iran-Contra affair erupted as President Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese…
Nov. 26 – In 1942, President Roosevelt ordered…
Nov. 27 – In 1973, the Senate voted 92-3 to confirm Gerald R. Ford as vice president, succeeding Spiro T. Agnew, who’d resigned.
Nov. 28 – In 1943, President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin met in Tehran during World War II…
Nov. 18 – In 1976, Spain’s parliament approved a bill to establish a democracy after 37 years of dictatorship.
Nov. 19 – In 1863, President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address as he dedicated a national cemetery at the site of the Civil War battlefield in Pennsylvania.
Nov. 20 – In 1945, 24 Nazi leaders went on trial before an international war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany….
Nov. 21 – n 1995, the presidents of three rival Balkan states agreed to make peace in Bosnia, ending nearly four years of terror and ethnic bloodletting that have left a quarter of a million people dead in the worst war in Europe since World War II…
Nov. 22 – In 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas…
Nov. 24 – In 1963, Jack Ruby shot and mortally wounded…

Lynn Sacco, interested in the struggle to reconcile the contradictions between what we observe and what we believe. Her research and teaching interests include the history of sexuality and gender; medicine, law, and public health; film and popular culture; and nineteenth century and twentieth-century U.S. history. She is currently researching a new book on how, before World War II, American movies served as a forum in which filmmakers and filmgoers established an ongoing conversation about sexual desire, a process that included, among other things, portraying children as erotic objects of adult desire. Her book, Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) uses sources from medicine, law, social reform, and popular culture to document both the occurrence of incest and the noisy silence around the subject. Focusing on discourses about the etiology of gonorrhea in girls, my book argues that as scientific breakthroughs in the 1890s improved doctors’ ability to detect the disease, their social biases diminished their ability to see the obvious evidence before them. When they discovered evidence that gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease, was "epidemic" among all classes of girls—not just girls from socially marginalized families—health care professionals and reformers revised their views about gonorrhea, not incest.

Unspeakable

December 03, 2012

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7278745-unspeakable Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History by Lynn Sacco This history of father-daughter incest in…

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