Robert W. Thurston
AUTHOR

Robert W. Thurston

History
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My new book is The Body in the Anglosphere, 1880-1920: "Well Sexed Womanhood," "Finer Natives," and "Very White Men." It's a study of how conceptions and images of the body changed in the English-speaking world, including colonies, in a period of sharp arguments about the meaning of civilization, gender, race, and masculinity/femininity. Vast technological change, for instance in the growth of photography and the invention of the modern, "safety" bicycle, plus the widening popularity of exercise, made the body much more visible and important than ever. Celebrity, e.g. in the form of Buffalo Bill, became possible because of photography, new printing techniques for posters, and cheaper and faster rail travel. After the 1870s, the circus put male and female bodies on display around the Anglosphere for millions for the first time. Millions more read the excellent, good, bad, and lousy literature of the day that focused on the body and sex. Out of the new images of the body--including of Africans and African Americans--came the origins of our current discussions of race and gender. My previous book is Coffee: From Bean to Barista. I cover the story of coffee from the ground up, but with particular emphasis on recent research on the plant, roasting and making coffee drinks, and coffee and health. I'm emeritus professor of history at Miami University (the original Miami, Oxford, Ohio). I started out as a historian of Russia and lived for two different academic years in the USSR. My first two monographs and my edited book of articles are all on twentieth-century Russia, tsarist and Soviet. My interest in the Great Terror led me in a thematic direction, to write about the European and Salem witch hunts. I then followed the thread of mass persecution by writing Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective. In recent years and in retirement from my teaching job, I've become deeply interested in coffee. I was also senior editor and contributor to Coffee: A Comprehensive Guide to the Bean, the Beverage, and the Industry (2013). Articles are by farmers, exporters, coffee federation members from various countries, importers, roasters, scientists, and major figures in the coffee industry. I've visited coffee farms in some 10 countries and have given many talks about coffee on four continents. Oxford Coffee Company, Oxford, OH, is a roastery and coffee bar that I founded, so I know that side of coffee, too. The video is of an old 2 lever, 2 group head Rancilio machine that I refurbished. My web site is http://robertwthurston.wordpress.com/
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