Maria Monk

How a lurid 19th-century memoir of sexual abuse produced one of the ugliest features of American politics.

'Pet of the Petticoats' extends the reach of Anglo-Atlantic anti-Catholicism to the stage, illustrating the ways its tropes and anxieties moved across genres.

Why some antebellum reformers thought convents were incompatible with "true womanhood."

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it.

Moral panics repeat, again and again.

Secular modernity requires the weeding out of all the baloney. Yet it’s not clear that we are any less credulous than before.