Interest in the Comstock Act has surged since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs. This essay explores the origins of the Comstock Act, the dubiousness of classifying obscenity, and the implications of embedding religious ideology into public policy. Drawing on parallels from the past, this essay ultimately asserts the precarity of bodily autonomy in a post-Dobbs United States.

The dominance of originalism in contemporary constitutional interpretation gives historians both an opportunity and a responsibility to explain and illustrate how our discipline would resolve questions about the original meaning, intention, and understanding of particular clauses. In response to this challenge, the Brennan Center at NYU Law School organized a Historians’ Council to mobilize how the profession can contribute to ongoing legal and political debates. Four members of the council formed a panel at the January 2025 annual meeting of the American Historical Association to discuss our approaches to the subject and to forecast the agenda going forward.

Colonists and settlers of nineteenth-century California built simple houses with available materials and skills. This bounded case study of selected Northern California houses for artisans, agriculture workers, shopkeepers, public servants, gold diggers, and industrial workers is informed by Dell Upton’s vernacular housing studies. It explains how specific regional contexts influenced local dwelling design, construction, and amenities, while acknowledging that housing was a part of larger economic, transportation, and information networks. Early Spanish/Mexican pueblo (town) and rancho (cattle ranch) adobes were typically one-room buildings with thatched roofs, dirt floors, and few windows. Construction of adobes was time-consuming and produced high-maintenance structures better suited to Southern California than to the high-rainfall, forested landscapes to which the Gold Rush drew American and international settlers. These newcomers sought shelter in tents or in crudely constructed log- and wood-frame dwellings. As the cultural context evolved from Spanish/Mexican to American/Northern European dominance, trade and immigration increased, with adobe and wood-frame builders taking advantage of the transition from an economy controlled by Spain and Mexico to one shaped by international market forces. Increased economic prosperity, the emergence of a California merchant class, industrialization of lumber production, the arrival of immigrants with building skills, and the growing availability of new and readily available building materials improved California’s housing stock. Interspersed among crude frontier shelters came adobes with stone foundations, wood floors, and interior fireplaces, and redwood cottages framed of dimensional, sawmill-cut lumber. By the end of the nineteenth century, wood structures outnumbered those of adobe. While wood prevailed as a structural material, builders often reproduced the form, massing, and style of earlier adobes, as expressed in the California ranch houses that were twentieth-century America’s most popular housing style.

Josephine Foster was doing her very best to feminize the wilderness. Sprinkling feminine imagery throughout her 1905 article for a women’s publication, she described the natural beauty of Glen Alpine Springs and encouraged her readers to discover for themselves the vacation pleasures of tramping in the mountains above Lake Tahoe, California. While Foster coaxed women into the wilds, another woman worked to keep them comfortable there. Throughout that summer, Foster hiked, climbed, and got tired, but at the end of the day, a warm bed and a hot meal awaited her because Katherine Chandler was back managing Glen Alpine Springs resort and taking good care of her guests. While women vacationing in the outdoors found freedom, female resort proprietors found opportunity. At a time when women faced limited choices in work outside the home, Katherine Chandler and other female resort proprietors found ways to turn traditional expectations of femininity to their advantage as businesswomen and outdoor enthusiasts. A collection of twenty unpublished letters written by Katherine Chandler, manager of Glen Alpine Springs to the resort’s owner, Susan Gilmore Pierce, forms the basis of this research. This essay knits together several strands in the historiographies of women in business, and women in the outdoors during the late Victorian and Progressive eras while contributing to the history of early tourism at Lake Tahoe.

The interests of Euro-American people who supported assimilation campaigns and participated in heritage tourism converged in Southern California in the early 1900s. The visual culture illustrated in postcards created an alternative sense of place. It was based in Native exploitation that promoted modernization and celebrated assimilation programs. Local promoters, tourists, and new residents displaced Indigenous people from active roles in the cultural heritage. Promoters and tourists used sites imbued with Native life, such as the Sherman Institute and the California missions, to popularize romanticized histories of the region. While intended to be visually pleasing, postcards from Southern California in the late 1800s and early 1900s represented a socially constructed history that ignored the realities of these contested sites. Using appeals to nostalgia to frame superficial narratives of vanishing Native American cultures, boosters created a market for collectors that capitalized on cultural tourism. Together, this visual culture and the physical landscape of many of Southern California’s tourist sites attempted to publicize the success of Native assimilation. This visual culture highlighted the climate of the time, when writers and promoters applauded progress toward Americanization and brought those views to wide audiences.