Professor John McCurdy

speaker

426 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 17 Apr

Professor John McCurdy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society · Sex Work in the American Revolution · 17 Apr 2026 podcast

Right.

So once you give up yourself to one man, what's to stop you from giving yourself up to other men?

Next thing you know, the woman has a child and ultimately the books end with the woman dying.

Of course it does.

I mean, the only real question is, does the child die, too, or does the child live?

That's the real question in these seduction novels.

But these are read widely and are really seen as a way of impressing upon young people to preserve themselves and keep themselves virtuous and chaste before they marry.

I know that's a hard question, because, I mean, in working and looking at homosexuality in this era, I was sort of interested that the obsession with, you know, men having sex with men, it seems to be, I don't want to say uniquely British, but is a very British concern.

And we know there are moral panics going on in London and across England in the 18th century, which will continue will to the 19th century.

In the colonies, in what becomes the United States, there's really not much interest in pursuing these charges.

And it's really kind of a live and let live, look the other way.

We don't really want the government investigating attitude in the 19th century.

Of course, this changes in the 20th century, right?

So I don't know.

I do think – I don't know if that's a lasting effect of the war and how that happens.

But, I mean, the war, I think, does have this devastating effect upon the nation.

And there is this –

deep interest in moving on and creating something new and separating who the American people are from who they were.

So I'm a professor at Eastern Michigan University.

So if anyone's ever in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which I can't imagine why anybody would ever be, other than my students, of course.

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