Often overlooked, disregarded, or hidden from historical accounts due to its racy connotations, the prostitution industry was one of the most important factors in the development of the American West. The “oldest profession” fueled the economies of camps, towns, and cities as they grew.Sex workers, from common prostitutes to reigning madams such as Anna Wilson, Maggie Wood, and Big Ann Wynne, defied social norms to make sure their hometowns, and they themselves, were successful. Their reasons for entering the life varied, from women who could find no other way to make money to those who desired independence and wealth. In return they were ostracized, criticized, and subject to fines, jail, disease, drug addiction, violence, and unwanted pregnancies. While their success stories are many, others failed in their endeavors, their names buried with them when they died. Behind Brothel Doors chronicles the history of the nineteenth-century sex work industry in the Great Plains states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.

Historian Jan MacKell Collins explores the history of prostitution in the Great Plains states of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. Each state had its share of working girls and madams like Lincoln's Josie Washburn and Wyatt Earp's lover Mattie Blaylock, who remain celebrities in the annals of history, but MacKell also includes the stories of lesser-known women whose role in this illicit trade nonetheless shaped our understanding of the American West. The book includes archival images and sidebar content about historic sex work and lesser-known laws.

Selling Sex in the City offers a worldwide analysis of prostitution since 1600. It analyses more than 20 cities with an important sex industry and compares policies and social trends, coercion and agency, but also prostitutes' working and living conditions.

Decades have passed and Garkoks Dran has grown up. The world has changed and his plans have changed along with it, but his goal remains the same. His training is now complete, and he is ready to spread his wings. The time has come for the Demon Overlord to amass his allies and face his adversaries. With his forces and funds in short supply, will Garkoks Dran be able to take on the world? Will the demons finally be able to return to the World of the Living, and will humanity be set free from slavery? Here begins the reign of history's greatest villain.

The second edition of Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor, and the New Woman transports students into the bohemian section of New York City known as an epicenter of rebels, artists, and seekers of personal transformation. Assuming roles as residents of "the Village," students gather at Polly's restaurant to re-create discussions about feminism, marriage, family, work, and community. A faction of students in suffragist roles seek the community's support for extending the franchise to women, while others in roles as labor organizers appeal to the community for help raising funds to support an ongoing strike. Students in this game must clarify their beliefs and make their choices through a vote. Will they prioritize gender or social class, political or economic change, or reform or revolution? Will they use their talents to support a suffrage parade or to create a pageant for the silk workers of Paterson, New Jersey? Or will they reject both factions and continue to work toward a new America through the transformation of the self?

“This exceptional book makes several key contributions to the field and shows how freedom and anxiety, and the market and morality, tensely coexist in the business of sex. . . . Kelly's analysis is conveyed through vivid portraits of the lives of sex workers, showing that the women involved are neither victims nor heroines but something else: actors caught between agency and constraint.”—Roger N. Lancaster, author of The Trouble with Nature “In this tour de force of feminist anthropology, Patty Kelly gives her heart to the remarkable women who toil in the bawdy sweatshops of the Zona Galactica, a 'reformed' red-light district in the Chiapas capital of Tuxtla Gutiérrez. In fact, as Kelly shows, it is just the ultimate low-wage industrial district.”—Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and In Praise of Barbarians “The clarity of Kelly's perspective is neither apologetic, nor presumptive (as is usually the case); her focus is always on the political context of these women's lives. Patty Kelly writes like a poet and novelist, so much so that this work begs to be a movie.”—Carol Leigh, a.k.a. “Scarlot Harlot,” author of Unrepentant Whore

Movie-Struck Girls examines women's films and filmgoing in the 1910s, a period when female patronage was energetically courted by the industry for the first time. By looking closely at how women were invited to participate in movie culture, the films they were offered, and the visual pleasures they enjoyed, Shelley Stamp demonstrates that women significantly complicated cinemagoing throughout this formative, transitional era. Growing female patronage and increased emphasis on women's subject matter did not necessarily bolster cinema's cultural legitimacy, as many in the industry had hoped, for women were not always enticed to the cinema by dignified, uplifting material, and once there, they were not always seamlessly integrated in the social space of theaters, nor the new optical pleasures of film viewing. In fact, Stamp argues that much about women's films and filmgoing in the postnickelodeon years challenged, rather than served, the industry's drive for greater respectability. White slave films, action-adventure serial dramas, and women's suffrage photoplays all drew female audiences to the cinema with stories aimed directly at women's interests and with advertising campaigns that specifically targeted female moviegoers. Yet these examples suggest that women's patronage was built with stories focused on sexuality, sensational thrill-seeking, and feminist agitation, topics not normally associated with ladylike gentility. And in each case concerns were raised about women's conduct at cinemas and the viewing habits they enjoyed, demonstrating that women's integration into motion picture culture was not as smooth as many have thought.