The Surprisingly Salacious History of the Modern Restaurant

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. 

A word of warning as we begin the episode: this episode may not be appropriate for younger ears, as it talks quite a lot about sex. 

If you were to head to Paris in the mid 18th century and ask for a restaurant, you would not be directed to a McDonald's. Rather, you might be handed a bowl of meat boullion, prepared in such a way as to improve vigor and perhaps even sperm production. Restaurant referred first to the broth itself, and then to the eateries in which men, and less frequently women, could eat said broth. By the late 18th century, the restaurant, by now meaning the luxurious establishment at which one could eat, had expanded to include more elaborate menus of delicate food items prepared by talented chefs. Unlike dinner at an inn, at a restaurant, a diner could order items from a menu, and each item was priced individually. Men dining in restaurants were often hungry for more than just food, and as grand restaurants opened in the Palais Royal in the 1780s, and then along the Right Bank of Paris after the revolution, restaurants and the city's sex workers formed a mutually beneficial relationship to serve those appetites. Many of the restaurants included private rooms where men and their mistresses or prostitutes could hide away from other diners. Beyond the boullion, other foods on the menu were also designed to stimulate the sexual appetite. Aphrodisiacs like oysters, crawfish, partridge, and champagne peppered the menus, along with desserts like vanilla ice. Various wars had kept most British visitors from France for several decades, but after Napoleon's second abdication in 1815, they flocked to Paris, and wrote back to their compatriots, waxing poetic about the wonders of the restaurants they found there. Americans, too, found their way to Paris in the 19th century, not just as tourists, but also as medical students, with an estimated 700 American medical students studying in Paris between 1830 and 1860. Some of them wrote in letters or in unpublished diaries about their adventures in Parisian restaurants. It's not surprising that Americans in Paris were wowed by the restaurants they found there, as American lawyer and travel writer Isaac Appleton Jewett complained in his 1838 travelogue, "Americans have no restaurants," although he made an exception for Delmonico's in New York City. Jewett's complaints about his fellow Americans went beyond the lack of restaurants, to their extreme anxiety about their moral diets. Evangelical Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, one of the leaders of this moral movement, published a book of essays in 1831 called, "Lectures on the Science of Life," which urged readers to control their passions in order to control their health. That meant suppressing both masturbation and even sex within marriage, which he argued should not happen more than once a month in the name of good health. Graham's recipe for controlling passion and thus ensuring health, was a vegetarian diet that included coarse unleavened brown bread, which he called, "the most important article of diet, which enters into the food of man." The first graham crackers, dull sugarless wafers, were created by followers of Graham, although he himself did not invent or profit from them. The 1832 cholera epidemic, which Graham blamed on,  "dietetic intemperance and lewdness," helped draw followers to his cause, but Americans couldn't be kept from the pleasures of restaurants forever. Immigrant brothers, Giovanni and Pietro Del Monaco, had expanded from a confectionary and catering house in the 1820s to a proper French style restaurant in Manhattan in the 1830s, complete, of course, with private rooms and aphrodisiac foods, such that one magazine writer reported in 1853 that women or children who dined there were, "apt to witness practices which are not likely to benefit their morals." Other restaurants popped up around New York, and in 1837, Joseph Boulanger, who had trained in Paris's Palais Royal, and had been head chef in the Jackson White House, opened a French restaurant in Washington, DC, that catered to the bachelor culture of the city, where senators and congressmen lived in boarding houses away from their families who lived back in the hometowns they represented. In San Francisco, which grew up quickly after the gold rush, the first French restaurant was called the Poodle Dog. Not only were there private rooms available in the Poodle Dog, but an elevator would deliver women directly to those private rooms. One of the Poodle Dog's competitors, Blanco's, installed an elevator big enough that a cab could drive right inside to deliver a woman to a private room. Men did not take their wives or mothers or any respectable women with them to these kinds of restaurants. Ice cream saloons, like the enormous Taylor's Epicurean Palace in New York City, popped up by the middle of the 19th century as respectable eateries women could be seen in, but even those could be seen as risque. It wasn't until 1869 that members of the Sorosis Club, an organization for professional women, booked the private rooms at Delmonico's for their meetings and began pushing the issue of their inclusion there. The larger campaign for inclusion would be a very long one. One of my family's favorite Chicago restaurants, the Berghoff, had a men's only bar all the way until 1969, when Gloria Steinem and six other members of the National Organization of Women sat down and demanded service. According to the National Restaurant Association, now that restaurants are a family affair, they contribute to about 6% of the GDP of the United States, or about $1.4 trillion in sales annually. In 2024, one Caribbean restaurant outside of St Louis, though, is looking to put sex back on the menu, with Jollof rice, tropical cocktails, hookahs and age restrictions. As they posted on social media when they opened, "This is strictly for the grown and sexy, so we're keeping it classy. Ladies, 30 and up, Fellas, 35 and up." Joining me in this episode is Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves, Professor of History at the University of Victoria, and author of, "Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex." 

Hi, Rachel, thanks so much for joining me today. 

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  11:03  
Thank you for having me. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:05  
I am super excited to speak to you about this book. I want to start by asking how in the world you came to write a book about food and sex.

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  11:15  
Well, initially I intended to write a book about food. So I had written a first book about the history of violence. I had written a second book about the history of sexuality, and I thought, :Oh, I'll write a third book about food, and I'll cover death, sex and food, and I'll basically cover the whole trinity of human behavior, or human experience." So I started doing research into Americans learning how to cook in Paris. I was living in Paris for a year, and I like cooking, and I like eating, so it seemed fun. And as I began doing research, I was finding all of this evidence of the history of sexuality in my sources, and I very quickly came to the realization that, like, the history of sex is just like all over the history of food, and yet that connection really hadn't been explored in any deep way in the historiography. So it presented itself to me. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:15  
So talk to me, then some about these sources. And you've been working on this book then for a long time, and so you've gathered just a ton of different source material, and that's obvious in the book. You quote just a ton of different sources. Could you talk to me some about the ways that you, different kinds of sources that you gathered, how you decided what to include, how you decided how to frame this? Obviously, the connection between sex and food is a huge one. You could have gone anywhere with this topic. So how did you decide to sort of limit what you were going to look at?

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  12:49  
That's a great question. This is a 10 year project. I should mention that in the midst of it, I wrote another book as well. One of the subjects, one of the human subjects of the book, who I initially intended to, you know, have three pages in Lustful Appetites, ended up being the subject of his own biography. So there was a pit stop in the middle, but the fact that I worked on research for about 10 years meant I generated just an enormous amount of material, and because food and sex are just ubiquitous topics, I had notes from all sorts of reading I'd done for other purposes, you know. Like I'm teaching a graduate seminar, or then something pops up in a book on the First Great Awakening, right? Or whatever it might be. And so I just had, like, reams and reams of notes, and I think maybe a third of my notes made it into this book. Like whole, whole chapters got left by the wayside. I should probably at some point write up some stuff I had to cut out. And so I had a real challenge figuring out how to limit the scope of the book. And initially, when I wrote a proposal for the book and shopped it to editors, I ended up sending it by request to an editor of Polity Press, which is the publisher for the book. And he was great. He read the proposal. It was 25 chapters, and it went from like the 200 Common Era, till you know, 2020 and he said to me, "You can't do that, like you have to narrow the scope, right? We can't have everything in here from like the Epistle of Barnabas to the Kama Sutra to the Desert Fathers to French Faverolles to everything else across time and space. So I ended up limiting it to nearly two and a half centuries and basically three countries. It really stretches from the emergence of the restaurant in late 18th century France through to the modern day, and it takes as its main subjects American, Britons and and French or American, British and French history. Yeah. So and and it's really a history of Anglo Americans and their encounters with French food and how that leads to this Anglo American reaction against French luxury.

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:14  
One of the things that you talk about in the book is the way that Puritans kind of get a bad rap. So Puritans should, should get a bad rap in some things. But I, you know, we, we talk a lot, I think, in the United States, about, like, oh, the, you know, the the Puritans are the reason that we don't like this, or we don't do this, or Americans have this view about something. And you pull out in the book the ways that you know it's not really the Puritans' fault, that Americans have certain views about food, or it's not just the Puritans' fault. So could you just talk some about that? 

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  15:53  
Yeah. Absolutely. So we have a common aphorism that I think H. L.  Mencken that Puritans are somebody who you know, worry that someone somewhere might be having a good time. And we use puritans with a small p, I think it's perfectly appropriate to refer to like people who are opposed to enjoyment and pleasure. But the historiography of Puritanism is obvious, has complicated that all, and so a lot of historians now would talk about puritan sex sectionalism. This is a term that Richard Godbeer uses and he talk he describes his works on 17th century history, examples of an 18th century history, examples of Puritans embracing the enjoyment of sex within marriage as a positive good. So some historians of food have argued that the asceticism, especially of 19th century Anglo American cuisine, this embrace of things like flavorless and boiled and, you know, the rejection of like flavoring, had Puritanical roots. But again, there's a lot of reasons to challenge this historical narrative. So first of all, while it is true that there are religious antecedents to a concern with flavorful food as being illicit, those religious concerns can be found within Catholicism. They can be found within Protestantism. They could be found within like low church Anglicanism or high church Anglicanism, right? They existed in France as well as in the United States, or what became the United States and Britain. So Puritanism alone doesn't really function as an explanation for us. And it is true that like capital P Puritans, those Protestants identified as Puritans and who governed Britain during the long parliament, for example, like they did ban plum pudding back luxurious eating. But it's also true that, for example, in colonial New England and Puritan era New England, there was, you know, a vast larder right. Like this, was an extremely productive land. The ocean was still full of fishes, and the woods were full of deer, and the farmland was productive and people ate well. This was not a 17th century cuisine in New England was robust, right? So the story is a lot more complicated than just Puritanism explains why Americans and Britons hate food so much.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:29  
So let's move then to France, to Paris, and to the rise of restaurants. And this is a much sexier story, or baudier story, than people might realize. When we think about restaurants today, we might think about, you know, a family restaurant. That is not the kind of thing we are talking about when we talk about these early restaurants in Paris. Can you talk a little bit about that? What? What is this kind of restaurant, that is these first kinds of restaurants that are coming into being? What is the purpose of them, and what is the clientele that is visiting these restaurants, and why?

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  19:10  
So I do think we still associate restaurants with romance, at some level, as a very common place to take somebody for a date. So we haven't completely divorced restaurant culture from sex and and and romance, but most of us would be shocked to realize just what sexual spaces restaurants were at their inception. So prior to the late 18th century, we don't really see anything resembling modern day restaurants in European or Western European culture. That doesn't mean they didn't exist in other places at other times, but not in Britain at that time, and not in France, not in colonial America. You did have places where you could get food when you were out of your home. For example, if you were a traveler and you stayed at an inn, you could eat the table d'hôte or the the meal served at the inn, but you weren't going to an inn to eat. The food was not good. It was at a set time. You shared the food with everybody. You know you made do with what you got. And there were also kind of like takeaway type of establishments in cities, but you don't get the emergence of what we would now recognize as a restaurant until around the 1760s, 1770s in Paris. And what distinguishes the restaurant is that it is a luxurious place. It is a place where you go for a multi sensory experience, which is well lit, which has fine tableware, where you are sitting in a public room, but at a private table. You're not sitting at the common table with everyone else. You can go in and sit down at any time that the restaurant is open. It's not like the table d'hôte is served from six to eight, you know, then you're out of there. So you go in anytime during opening hours and you order off of a menu, and a menu is itemized, and the different dishes, which are valued are priced per item, and the function of this place is to go and eat. It's not a place to go and stay, and the food is good, right? That's the allure. It's delicious. It's abundant and it's elaborate. And there's one other aspect of the restaurant, which is very common in the late 18th and early 19th century, which is different from today, and that is that many of these restaurants were places for sexual assignations, and they often had private rooms called cabinets particulier, where men could eat with women who were not their wives, who may have been mistresses or may have been sex workers at varying levels, courtesans or more sort of ordinary what were called, then soupeurs, or kind of women who hung out around restaurants trying to pick men up. And these private rooms had doors that locked. They were served by waiters who were renowned for their discretion, would not enter without knocking first, and they had couches. And so you could go, you could meet, you could bring the women. You could basically trade food for sex, or, you know, more diamonds and food for sex. And there were all sorts of tricks of the trade. So the women who frequented these rooms, the sex workers who frequented these rooms, would do things like, order up bottles of champagne, save the corks, and then come back the next day and exchange the cork to the restaurateur for a kickback, right? Which, again, is a practice that we actually see in the 20th century as well. Like, this doesn't go away. Or a restaurateur would tell the soupeurs, "Hey, like, I got a lot of this stuff that's going off, you know, order this, like, I need to move it right, unload this inventory." So there were also, or like these rooms would sometimes have like, fans on the mantelpiece. And the women would say that the man who had taken them to the room, like, "Oh, please get me this beautiful fan, or get me this," and he would buy it or be added to the bill, and then she would take it back to the restaurant the next day and trade it back again for kickback, or would go back on the mantel for the next meal. So there's all sorts of these. Restaurants are sites of sex. They're sites of sex work, and they're notorious for that, and they're also the rooms themselves were often like the public room as well as the private room, were often sexualized spaces. A lot of the restaurants had female cashiers, dames de comptoir, who were hired or employed for their beauty, who would, you know, wear revealing clothes and makeup and or jewelry. The art in the restaurants could be erotic. So they were, they were highly sexualized spaces.

Kelly Therese Pollock  23:39  
And then what happens as restaurants start to come to the United States? This is later, this is in the the 19th century. Is this the same kind of style of restaurant that we're seeing there?

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  23:55  
So we get the spread of restaurants beyond France to the United States and to Britain, really, not. It doesn't really happen until the mid 19th century. It takes a shockingly long time, so that, like throughout the eight the antebellum era, you get a lot of visitors to France writing books about like, "Oh, and you wouldn't believe the restaurants, like, I went to restaurants, right?" Amazing. Eventually, they do travel across and they they multiply in form and function. So for New York City, which has a booming population growth in the antebellum era, right, and the migration of lots of unattached men who are living in boarding houses. In the 1850s, New York is already becoming like a huge restaurant city, and there are high end restaurants that are very much like the French restaurants in Paris, and many of these do have private rooms, and there are low end restaurants. There are oyster saloons and and box saloons and less expensive places. Most restaurants are associated with sexuality, though, throughout the 19th century, and whether that's sort of high end or low end, by and large, respectable women do not eat at restaurants in Britain and the United States in the 19th century, or only at very limited restaurants, only at certain places which were somehow beyond suspicion. And even when new types of restaurants open with the express purpose of serving respectable women, like ice cream saloons, which open, sweets in the 19th century, are often associated with women. They're not serving alcohol, which means that makes them more respectful spaces. These are spaces that are opening up in cities like New York, but you know, in other places as well, specifically to be accessible to middle class, respectable women and and elite women. They soon become disreputable, right? So like as soon as women go to them, you start getting these rumors that actually these ice cream saloons are really brothels, and they become shocked when places and an ice cream becomes a disreputable food. So it just the presence of women, no matter what the institution is, immediately raises the suspicion that something sexually illicit is going on in this place.

Kelly Therese Pollock  26:22  
So what does it take then to start changing that attitude?

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  26:28  
Pushback from women in the era of the new woman, the turn of the 20th century, again, as you have increasing numbers of women in the workforce, women with professional degrees. Women push back against this old system, and they demand access to restaurants. And in order for them to have access to restaurants, they have to pressure restaurateurs to evict sex workers. So it comes at the cost of sex workers' livelihood. So restaurateurs increasingly close their door to sex workers. They close they close their private rooms, or they transform the usage of their private rooms and they respond to demands in a changing world to become more accessible. That said, like, like, the system persists in the 20th century for a long time. So there are stag restaurants. They're often called grilles. Like, if you look at old menus, you'll see like, something grille. These are often stag restaurants that excluded women entirely, and their argument was that if women were allowed, the places would be flooded with prostitutes, and those are legally challenged during like the second wave feminist movement. In fact, Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a lawyer is active in some of those lawsuits challenging stag restaurants in places like Louisiana, in New Orleans, New York and elsewhere. But you can find stag restaurants all throughout the United States and Canada into the late 20th century, and push back again from restaurateurs who, like as late as the 1970s are saying things like, "If we let restaurant, if we let women into our restaurants, it will be all prostitutes." So usually they'll say hookers or something. So the system persists, and it continues to be the case that, you know, there are certain sectors of the restaurant culture which are considered more acceptable for women, like cafeterias in the mid 20th century are acceptable places for women workers to eat alone and not to be seen as as sex workers if they're there. And diners like that's really like diners become sort of acceptable places for middle class women in the post World War II era. This really for those of us who were born at some point in the 20th century, it's recent history, right? Very recent. And I think a lot of women, myself included, have probably had the experience of having tried to eat alone in a restaurant and being quickly approached by men, right? So like,  I think there's a lot of women who's still uncomfortable about eating alone in restaurants, and the reason why they're uncomfortable is because it's seen that's seen as an invitation by a lot of men, or used to be seen as an invitation by a lot of men that you wanted to be, you know, approached.

Kelly Therese Pollock  29:34  
Yeah. Another way that you connect food and sex in the book is this connection, for a long time, that liking food or being interested in food, or cooking food is somehow for men, at least, is like a gay pursuit. And in fact, for a long time, many of the men who are involved in the food scene are chefs, are writing cookbooks, are, in fact, gay themselves. Could you talk some about that? And you talk about a lot of prominent lesbians in Paris, for instance, who are part of the food scene as well. So can you talk some about that? What is going on there, and how that starts eventually, but much later to shift?

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  30:23  
In the book, the big argument I make is that I trace what I call like the rise and fall of a particular gastrosexual or alimentary-sexual regime, what I call the good food, bad sex regime. And by bad sex, I mean illicit sex. So what I argue is that the emergence of the restaurant as this place for indulgent food that is also highly sexualized leads to a counter reaction among Anglo Americans in the 19th century who stigmatize indulgence and good food as sexually illicit. So there's a sort of moralizing discourse that falls particularly harshly on women, that if you are expressive of your alimentary appetites, it must be because you are also prey to excessive sexual appetites, lustful appetites. And this moral discourse creates an opportunity for the emergence of, as Foucault would have put it, a counter discourse right. Like you can use this to position yourself against and so in the later 19th century, you get the emergence of bohemianism. And bohemians are people who can position themselves in contrast to moral moralism and puritanical puritanism with a lowercase p. And so bohemians embrace both indulgence and good food and a challenge of sexual norms as part of their counter cultural orientation. And in the 20th century, this opens up the possibility, with the emergence of same sex subcultures, lesbian subcultures, queer male subcultures, of the possibility of defining those subcultures through this bohemian embrace of both good food and non normative sex, right? So you are you position yourself as not part of the Solomon Grundys of the world, by Mrs. Grundys of the world, by owning up to your love of food and sex and so indulgence in good food and what I call hedonic eating, right? Eating for pleasure becomes a marker of queer subcultures in the 20th century, and in the mid 20th century, it becomes very much a marker of gay male culture. And you get the rise of the archetype of the gay gourmet. And this is a this is intensified for gay men because cooking and the world of food is feminized, and this is a period of time in which the homosexuality as such, is identified with gender inversion, right? So male effeminacy is equated with homosexuality, and a love of cooking and good food is effeminate, therefore it makes you it makes you gay. But it is, in fact, both sort of archetypal, but also good food, gourmet culture does become integral to gay male culture in the mid 20th century, and I think remains with us today. You know, I was at a party. I was going to a party with some girlfriends over Halloween, and parties thrown by a gay man. And one of the friends I was with was like, "Oh, you know the food's gonna be great. Because, you know, it's, he's a gay man." Like, ding, ding, ding. Like, this has not this, this association has not gone anywhere. And I will say the food was great, like really excellent cheese board. So right on. But funnily enough, the girlfriends I was going to this party with were all my age range, I'm in my late 40s. You know, they're late 40s, early 50s. But when I talk to my students who are born in the 21st century, they do not share this association between gay men and good food.

Kelly Therese Pollock  34:21  
So why is it that that association has been broken? Like what? What has changed in that time?

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  34:31  
So I argue in the book that in the late 20th century and early 21st century, we have shifted from this older, alimentary- sexual regime of good food, bad sex, to a new regime, which I call bad food, good sex. So during the 70s and 80s, you get a shift with the rise of counter culture. There's a sort of reclaiming of good food culture for straight men as part of the general challenge. Change that counterculture process to sexual binaries. Men get to wear flowing clothes with flowers on them and grow their hair out. Women get to wear denim. Sexual binaries are challenged. And then in the 80s, marketers, and you can see this I have in the book, I talk about this like very famous article in Forbes Magazine, which is widely advertised by them, you know, where they say, like, you know, "Good food is no longer gay. You know, hey, businesses, you can advertise for straight men and make a lot of money." So you get the rise in the 80s of the foodie. This is a word that is invented in the 1980s. There's some arguments about who invented it. I talk about that argument in the book. But what the foodie is is like commoditized reclaiming of good food culture by straight men. So you can now buy into this culture and it doesn't mean that you're gay. It doesn't mean that you can't be gay and a foodie, you can be, but to be a foodie doesn't mean you are gay in the way that to be a gourmet by 1980 means, like, if you're a man and you're a gourmet, it means you're gay. So we get the rise of foodie culture, and then the sort of straightening of foodie culture is heavily reinforced by advertisers who want that market of straight men's money, right? And who aggressively sell food technologies and new foods as straight in their advertising. And I think you know, this is reinforced by the Food Network, Food TV, and you get the rise of the sort of macho chef archetype, the leather aproned chef. And so that goes to a far way to undermining the association between gay men and gourmet food, but it doesn't destroy the moralizing and the sexual moralizing around food. Instead, like I said, I see that emergence of a new regime, where, in the 21st century, we've begun to associate good food, in fact, with ahedonic eating, non pleasurable eating, because our moral equation has shifted to where now the equation is that to have good sex, which no longer means moral sex, but means pleasurable sex, orgasmic sex, to have good sex, we have to have sexy bodies. And in order to have a sexy body, we have to restrict our caloric intake. So we have to discipline our bodies, discipline our flesh, reduce our flesh in order to be fit subjects for good or pleasurable sex. And I end the book with an epilogue where I I make fun of the vast genre, I shouldn't say make fun, but of course, I do. I make fun of the vast genre of 50 Shades of Gray inspired cookbooks, but a lot of them are like the most unhedonic foods you can imagine. So like 50 shades of kale or like 50 shades of quinoa, and it's like foods which, like would make no sense to associate with sexuality or sex in the 20th century, but in the 21st century, a diet of kale and quinoa is what makes you sexy, and then you could have good sex. You can hear from the tone of my voice that I challenge this narrative, and think it is possible to have good sexy sex, even if you don't restrict your calories and have flesh.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:37  
All right, I have one more question for you, and that is that in your list of books, you did not mention the novel that you have written. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about writing a novel and what that's like.

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  38:49  
So I am a lover of fiction and a lifelong writer of fiction. So you should ask me about all the novels I've written that I haven't published, which are numerous. But I was lucky enough to get one published. It's co authored with my brother Aram Sinnreich. We write under the pen name R.A. Sinn. So that's our first initials and the first half of what was my maiden name, what is his last name. The novel is called, "A Second Chance for Yesterday," and it's a near future dystopian sci fi novel in which a unfortunate programmer ends up as the result of a software glitch traveling back in time by one day each day, while the rest of the world moves forward in time. And she has to figure out how to get herself out of this predicament. It was a blast to write, and my brother and I have written some other fiction that we're working on and revising. So it is our our fervent hope that it won't be a one off, but that there will be more novels coming out from R. A. Sinn in the future.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:01  
Does writing fiction change at all the way you think about writing history?

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  40:08  
I've always loved writing, and it was always my intention to write history that was readable and engaging. I went into graduate school with that as like that was my statement of intent when I was applying for grad school. We're talking about the late 90s here. So it was always my goal. Then I went through graduate school and got socialized into writing in a non engaging way. But I have always aspired to write engaging history, and I bring that attention to my my history as well as my fiction.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:38  
Well, I think that your history is very engaging, and I think that this in particular, is a super fun book, so I want to encourage people to read it. How can American audiences pre-order?

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  40:54  
It is available for pre order on all the websites where you can pre-order such things. I would recommend your independent bookstore, and it is due to be released in North America and the United States and Canada in February, mid  February. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  41:09  
Well, Rachel, thank you so much. This was a really fun read, and it was great to speak with you.

Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves  41:15  
Thanks so much. Thanks for doing this. I'm excited to have it out there in the world.

Teddy  42:03  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode of suggestions, please email kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!