The Unmentionable History of the West is a fond romp through the underwear that men and women wore in days gone by. Think of corsets, navy blue bloomers, long underwear with its trap door and brassieres that could kill. Think also of the other unmentionables that came along with being sexual beings. Women had to hide their pregnancies, talk of birth control was illegal, seduction was a crime, prostitution likewise. There were so many silences, so many secrets about the private lives of men and women. Then along came the 1960s and the social revolution known as the women's movement. Suddenly, underwear was out, girdles were gone and women began wearing pants. What came first then . . . the women's movement or pants? The removal of restrictive underwear or the force that was Gloria Steinem? The Unmentionable History of the West tackles these questions seriously, but with a good dose of humour.

Buddhism teaches that to become happy, greed, ill-will, and delusion must be transformed into their positive counterparts: generosity, compassion, and wisdom. The history of the West, like all histories, has been plagued by the consequences of greed, ill-will, and delusion. A Buddhist History of the West investigates how individuals have tried to ground themselves to make themselves feel more real. To be self-conscious is to experience ungroundedness as a sense of lack, but what is lacking has been understood differently in different historical periods. Author David R. Loy examines how the understanding of lack changes at historical junctures and shows how those junctures were so crucial in the development of the West.

In ancient Greece, women strapped lengths of cloth across their breasts and then covered them with tunics. These bosom protectors were the antecedents of the brassiere, which didn't come along until the 20th century. With the use of fine art, photography, film stills, cartoons, and ads, Unmentionables describes the social history of a subject that holds a powerful fascination for us all. 120 full color and b&w illustrations.

As weavers, garment workers, and peddlers, Syrian immigrants in the Americas fed the early twentieth-century transnational textile trade. These migrants and the commodities they produced—silk, linen, and cotton; lace and embroidery; undergarments and ready-wear clothing—moved along steamship routes from Beirut through Marseille and Madeira to New York City, New England, and Veracruz. As migrants and merchants crisscrossed the Atlantic in pursuit of work, Syrian textile manufacturing expanded across the hemisphere. Unmentionables offers a history of the global textile industry and the Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians who worked in it. Stacy Fahrenthold examines how Arab workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation. She writes women workers—the majority of Syrian garment workers—back into US labor history. She also situates the rise of Syrian American industrial elites, who exerted supply chain power to combat labor uprisings, resist unionization, and stake claim to the global textile industry. Critiquing the hegemony of the Syrian peddler in histories of this diaspora, Unmentionables introduces alternative narrators: union activists who led street demonstrations, women garment workers who shut down kimono factories, child laborers who threw snowballs at police, and the diasporic merchant capitalists who contended with all of them.

Learn what men, women, and children have worn—and why—in American history, from the deprivations of the Civil War through the prosperous 1890s. In Clothing through American History: The Civil War through the Gilded Age, 1861–1899, authors Anita Stamper and Jill Condra provide information on fabrics, materials, and manufacturing; a discussion of daily life and dress; and the types of clothes worn by men, women, and children of all levels of society. The volume features numerous illustrations, helpful timelines, resource guides recommending Web sites, videos, and print publications, and extensive glossaries. Among the many topics discussed include: • The hours that middle class women of the nineteenth century spent making clothes for themselves and their families • The plain, rough clothes assigned to slaves to ensure that they did not enhance their appearance and their later trouble in buying clothes after emancipation • The Bloomer dress reform movement in the mid to late 19th century, where women who adopted loose, baggy trousers for practicality were called evil and unnatural • The beginnings of clothing and department stores

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Have you ever wished you could live in an earlier, more romantic era? Ladies, welcome to the 19th century, where there's arsenic in your face cream, a pot of cold pee sits under your bed, and all of your underwear is crotchless. (Why? Shush, dear. A lady doesn't question.) UNMENTIONABLE is your hilarious, illustrated, scandalously honest (yet never crass) guide to the secrets of Victorian womanhood, giving you detailed advice on: ~ What to wear ~ Where to relieve yourself ~ How to conceal your loathsome addiction to menstruating ~ What to expect on your wedding night ~ How to be the perfect Victorian wife ~ Why masturbating will kill you ~ And more Irresistibly charming, laugh-out-loud funny, and featuring nearly 200 images from Victorian publications, UNMENTIONABLE will inspire a whole new level of respect for Elizabeth Bennett, Scarlet O'Hara, Jane Eyre, and all of our great, great grandmothers. (And it just might leave you feeling ecstatically grateful to live in an age of pants, super absorbency tampons, epidurals, anti-depressants, and not-dying-of-the-syphilis-your-husband-brought-home.)