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Dystopian Bodies

In her newest book, Barbara Ehrenreich attacks the "epidemic" of wellness.
by Niko Maragos via Los Angeles Review of Books on June 7, 2018

Shouldn’t You Be in California?

The western frontiers of national wellness culture.
by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela via Boom California on January 9, 2018
Magazine ad for a shower radio, showing a man happily singing while he bathes.

The Wet History of Media in the Bathroom

How media technologies made themselves at home in one of the most private spaces of modern life.
by Rachel Plotnick via The MIT Press Reader on June 12, 2025
RFK Jr speaking at a podium.

RFK’s Ideas About “Wellness Farms” for Young People Are Eugenic and Unconstitutional

RFK’s call for “wellness farms” revives a grim legacy of forced labor, racial injustice, and eugenics disguised as mental health reform.
by Kylie Smith via Nursing Clio on May 8, 2025
Man working on a farm.

RFK Jr.’s 18th-Century Idea About Mental Health

The health secretary’s clearest plans for psychiatric treatment are a retreat to the past.
by Shayla Love via The Atlantic on April 4, 2025
A drawing of the book "Fat is a Feminist Issue" by Susie Orbach with a magnifying glass in front of it.

Was “Fat Is a Feminist Issue” Liberating? Or Weight-Loss Propaganda?

Susie Orbach’s 1978 book is a fascinating snapshot of diet and physical culture in a very different era.
by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela via The New Republic on December 5, 2024
Skeletons in a museum posed with varying postures, as if they are performing different tasks.

Why Americans Are Obsessed With Poor Posture

The 20th-century movement to fix slouching questions the moral and political dimensions of addressing bad backs over wider public health concerns.
by Zoe Adams via The Nation on November 20, 2024
Drawing of a competetitve pedestrian walking in the late 1800s with spectators watching.

America’s Earliest Sports Stars Were … Professional Walkers?

Walking needs no publicist. The simplest, most accessible form of exercise has been around since humans first foraged and traveled on the ground.
by Jackie Mansky via Zócalo Public Square on October 18, 2024
An illustration of the book "Silent Spring" on top of the earth.

This Book Helped Save the Planet—but Created a Very Harmful Myth

It radically shifted the way the world looked at the environment, but created a wave of misinformation we’re still dealing with today.
by Katie MacBride via Slate on September 29, 2024
A group of Black women in swimsuits and caps gather in a group in a pool.

The Intimacy of Exercise: Sensuality and Sexuality in Black Women’s Fitness History

How did the sensuality, sexuality, and homosociality of exercise create intimate possibilities for Black women in postwar America?
by Ava Purkiss via Nursing Clio on July 3, 2024
A photograph of four children standing, one is slouching.

Are You Sitting Up Straight? America’s Obsession with Improving Posture

In Beth Linker’s new book, she applies a disability studies lens to the history of posture.
by Laura Ansley via Perspectives on History on May 9, 2024
Students in Winnetka, Ill., are checked by a nurses as shown here on return to school following illness. 1947.
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To Address the Teen Mental Health Crisis, Look to School Nurses

For more than a century, school nurses have improved public health in schools and beyond.
by Sherrie Page Guyer via Made By History on May 8, 2024
Image of plastic human figurine hunched over at a desk and computer.

How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body

Decades before 'Zoom fatigue' broke our spirits, the so-called computer revolution brought with it a world of pain previously unknown to humankind.
by Laine Nooney via Vice on March 12, 2021

Madame Yale Made a Fortune With the 19th Century's Version of Goop

A century before today’s celebrity health gurus, an American businesswoman was a beauty with a brand.
by Emmeline Clein via Smithsonian on March 1, 2020

A Brief History of Seltzer Booms in America

For over 100 years, the bubbly beverage has gone in and out of vogue as a wellness tonic.
by Maya Kroth via Medium on August 12, 2019

The Death and Life of a Great American Building

Longtime tenant in the 165-year-old St. Denis building in New York City reflects on the building's history.
by Jeremiah Moss via New York Review of Books on March 7, 2018
A collage of advertisements for lithium and lithium water.

The Truth About Lithium Might Never Come Out

Longevity enthusiasts are microdosing a 19th-century cure-all. Are they onto something?
by Shayla Love via The Atlantic on October 4, 2024
Photo of a female jogger drinking water out of a pink metal water bottle.
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Your New Year's Resolution to Drink More Water Has a History

Our water bottle obsession speaks to deeper historical trends.
by Emily J. H. Contois via Made By History on January 2, 2024
Children in a Head Start classroom look out a window at others in the playground.
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America Already Knows How to Address Child Poverty

The history of Head Start shows that child poverty is a choice.
by Michelle Bezark via Made By History on October 5, 2023
Native American and Black girls tossing around a medicine ball in a circle.

Right Living, Right Acting, and Right Thinking

How Black women used exercise to achieve civic goals in the late nineteenth century.
by Ava Purkiss via Lapham’s Quarterly on April 17, 2023
A red circle with a slash through it over a pair of puckered lips, superimposed on anti-kissing newspaper articles. Screenshots via Newspapers.com, lips vector by Vecteezy.

The Woman Who Fought to End the 'Pernicious' Scourge of Kissing

New understandings of how disease spread informed Imogene Rechtin's ill-fated 1910 campaign to ban a universal human practice.
by John Last via Smithsonian on May 31, 2022
Masked Japanese Internment Camp Prisoner

Ask a Historian: Did Japanese Americans Have Access to Vaccines in WWII Incarceration Camps?

Shibutani, Haruo Najima, and Tomika Shibutani reported that the vaccination lines stretched as long as 200 yards. “The conditions were atrocious.”
by Brian Niiya via Densho: Japanese American Incarceration and Japanese Internment on March 9, 2022

The Five-Day Workweek is Dead

It’s time for something better.
by Anna North via Vox on July 13, 2021
box of matches with faces drawn on the match sticks

Burnout: Modern Affliction or Human Condition?

As a diagnosis, it’s too vague to be helpful—but its rise tells us a lot about the way we work.
by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on May 17, 2021
A collage of book covers.

The Radical Origins of Self-Help Literature

How did the genre of self-help go from one focused on collective empowerment to one serving the class hierarchy as it stands?
by Jennifer Wilson via The Nation on November 17, 2020
A drawing of a person with a facial expression of pain with "Simple Bodily Pain" written above

The Fifth Vital Sign

How the pain scale fails us.
by Gracia Dodds via Nursing Clio on October 28, 2020

The 'Father of American Neurology' Prescribed Women Months of Motionless Milk-Drinking

Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were both patients of this infamous rest cure.
by Abbey Perreault via Atlas Obscura on September 28, 2018
1870 cartoon of people going camping

The Religious Roots of America's Love for Camping

How a minister's accidental bestseller launched the country's first outdoor craze.
by Terence Young via What It Means to Be American on October 12, 2017
Turn of the century campers eating melon outside their tent

Before Camping Got Wimpy: Roughing It With the Victorians

A brief history of camping.
by Hunter Oatman-Stanford via Collectors Weekly on August 1, 2012

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