| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. By Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 278 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 978-0-226-11233-6. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-0-226-11234-3.)

Mindful through my own work of the puffery antebellum reviewers unleashed upon their often unsuspecting readers, I have become reticent to heap praise upon even today's deserving books without leavening it with some criticism. The first exception in my reviewing career is a book that I believe should be on the shelf of every antebellum sociocultural historian: The Flash Press, by a power trio of nineteenth-century American public sexuality scholars, Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. Each has previously written cutting-edge books featuring masterful in-depth research in primary sources on sexual topics so controversial in their own time and so censorship-worthy after the 1873 federal Comstock Law, that it is a miracle that any documentation has survived.

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