I would like to take a moment here to highlight some of the amazing academic books that are currently available for free and without subscription at Project Muse right now. #ReadAcademic

Inventing the Pinkertons; or, Spies, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs: Being a story of the nation’s most famous (and infamous) detective agency by S. Paul O'Hara. How an agency began by selling (faulty) intel to the Union Army and grew up to protect scabs during labour strikes.

Blue-Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater by Timothy R. White. How the craftwork of Broadway theatre, sets, sound, lights, and costumes, fueled an American industry and how that changed with the rise of regional theatre and increased globalization.

The five part series A History of the Book in America, tracing book history and print culture in the US from before the Revolutionary War to the present.

The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth Century America by Lara Freidenfelds. Discusses the changes in menstruation support from the days of rags as menstrual supplies into the modern era of pads and tampons and how the medical field has and has not supported menstruators.

Staging Family: Domestic Depictions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses by Nan Mullenneaux. About how in the 19th c., when actresses were able to be the breadwinners in their families and commit to careers, they still had to give a public impression of domesticity.

Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States by Kirsten Delegard. After the passage of the 19th Amendment, how conservative women successfully blocked progressive female activism from the mainstream using traditional gender roles.

Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992 by Rick Houston, J. Milt Heflin & John Aaron. A book celebrating the men and women of Johnson Space Center's Mission Control.

Silk Stockings & Socialism: Philadelphia's Radical Hosiery Workers from the Jazz Age to the New Deal by Sharon McConnell-Sidorick. A history of the American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers (AFFFHW).

The Drunken Duchess of Vassar: Grace Harriet Macurdy, Pioneering Feminist Classical Scholar by Barbara Macmanus. Here's the story of a disabled woman Classics professor at the turn of the 20th c., the first classicist to focus on ancient women.

The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor. A comprehensive study of warrior women from the Mediterranean to China.

Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender and Race edited by Sherrie Inness, one of my absolute favourite pop culture and gender authors. Contains a chapter called "The Joy of Sex Instruction: Women and Cooking in Marital Sex Manuals, 1920–1963"

Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles: The Enigma of Francis Crawford by Scott Richardson. For those Lymond fans on my list (I believe there are several of you, including @EllenKushner...) https://muse.jhu.edu/book/52040 

Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800, Judith M. Bennett & Amy M. Froide, eds. An entire book about never-married women in the Europe! How great is that? Don't believe the domestic nuclear family lies. Single women have been around forever.

The True Life Wild West Memoir of a Bush-Popping Cow Waddy by Charley Hester (I mean, the title alone) The recollections of a young man who went West in the 1870s to be a cowboy before starting a ranching empire in Nebraska with his brother.

Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 by Jay A. Gertzman. Again, the title alone. Plus it's about the erotic literature industry from the 20s to the 40s and what's not fun about that?

Bacchus & Civic Order: The Culture of Drinking in Early Modern Germany by Ann Tlusty. Discusses drunkenness, dueling, and "tavern comportment" as modes of civic management.

A Knight's Own Book of Chivalry by Geoffroi de Charny. A book written by one of the premier knights in France during the Hundred Years' War for the edification of other knights. A code of conduct for your fourteenth century knight lessons.

The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine by Monica H. Green. An analysis of historical gynecological literature through the lens of a single work, The Trotula, an 11th or 12th century medical book from Salerno Italy.

Staging Migrations toward an American West: From Ida B. Wells to Rhodessa Jones by Marta Effinger-Crichlow. "[H]ow black women's theatrical & everyday performances of migration toward the American West expose the complexities of their struggles for sociopolitical emancipation"

Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 by Mark G. Hanna. An in-depth look at the way that pirates and piracy contributed to economic growth in port cities across the British Empire.