1801-1825

Madame Restell (1811-1878) was the most famous abortion provider and female physician in nineteenth-century America, so much so that "Restellism" became a synonym for abortion.  Nicholas Syrett, author of The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America's Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (2023), reflects on Restell's life, placing it alongside the history of the criminalization of abortion in the United States.

Join us as scholar Ron Tyler discusses his latest publication Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images. Westward expansion in the United States was deeply intertwined with the technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, from railroads to telegraphy. Among the most important of these, if often forgotten, was the lithograph. Before photography became a dominant medium, lithography—and later, chromolithography—enabled inexpensive reproduction of color illustrations, transforming journalism and marketing and nurturing, for the first time, a global visual culture.

In Prints of a New Kind, Dr. Allison M. Stagg details the political strategies and scandals that inspired the first generation of American caricaturists in the country’s transformative early years between 1789 and 1828. She examines the caricatures that mocked politicians and events reported in newspapers, the reactions captured in personal papers of the politicians being satirized, and the lives of the artists who satirized them.