Andrea Friedman and Ian Darnell How do digital maps help us understand the history of sexuality and gender in new ways?  Projects that use Geographic Information System (GIS) methods can document the shifting sites of queer sociality making it possible for viewers to see the changing ways that LGBTQ people made space for themselves in an environment that was often hostile to their existence. But these projects can do much more. The sorts of spatial thinking enabled by digital mapping provide historians with exciting opportunities to analyze social relations in the ..read more

Andrea Rottmann with input from Nina Reusch and Benjamin Bauer The conference Späte Aufarbeitung. Lebenswelten und Verfolgung von LSBTTIQ im deutschen Südwesten (Coming to Terms with the Past, Belatedly. Life-worlds and Persecution of LGBTTIQ in the German Southwest), which took place on June 27-28, 2016 in Bad Urach, Germany, served as a showcase for the promising beginnings being made in the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTTIQ) history in Germany. Putting the country’s southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg at its center, the con ..read more

Ania Ostrowska  The Institute of Sexology exhibition ran at the Wellcome Collection in London from November 2014 to September 2015. This was the first major event of its kind in the UK investigating the history of sexology. It was also the first exhibition the Wellcome Collection held in its newly refurbished building on Euston Road, and at nearly a year long, it was the Collections’s longest exhibition to date. In her Notches review in April 2015, Heike Bauer noted that as visitors were exiting the exhibition, they were “confronted with an invitation to ..read more

Chris Mowat This past year I’ve had the pleasure of being part of a group helping to put together the “Proud! Telling LGBT+ Stories in Sheffield” project at Weston Park Museum, Sheffield. It was initiated when one of the curators, Clara Morgan, noticed there were no objects in the collections categorised as LGBT+ beyond a few leaflets about sexual health from the early 2000s, meaning the wider stories of queer lives in Sheffield past and present were not being represented. The ensuing community-led project has resulted in an exhibition at the entrance to the “Sheffield Life and Times” gallery ..read more

Moderated by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu In December 2021, Alexander Street/ProQuest is launching Queer Pasts, a new digital history platform that will present topical exhibits featuring historical essays and primary sources. Modelled on Women and Social Movements (WASM), currently edited by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (University of California, Irvine) and Rebecca Jo Plant (University of California, San Diego), Queer Pasts will be available primarily via college and university institutional subscriptions. This roundtable, moderated by Wu, features the coeditors of Queer Pasts, Lisa Arellano (Mills College) and Mar ..read more

Chris Parkes Among the lesser known casualties of the U.S. Republican Party-mandated partial government shutdown in 2018-2019 was the premature closure of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library’s special exhibition “The Art of War: American Poster Art 1941-1945.” Launched last April, the exhibition featured 150 selections from the FDR Library’s collection of over 3000 posters and murals depicting a multitude of public information campaigns, or propaganda, that helped the U.S. government rally its citizens to victory in World War Two. With previously overlooked offerings from popular ar ..read more

Ania Ostrowska  The Institute of Sexology exhibition ran at the Wellcome Collection in London from November 2014 to September 2015. This was the first major event of its kind in the UK investigating the history of sexology. It was also the first exhibition the Wellcome Collection held in its newly refurbished building on Euston Road, and at nearly a year long, it was the Collections’s longest exhibition to date. In her Notches review in April 2015, Heike Bauer noted that as visitors were exiting the exhibition, they were “confronted with an invitation to ..read more