Civil War soldiers enjoyed unprecedented access to obscene materials of all sorts, including mass-produced erotic fiction, cartes de visite, playing cards, and stereographs. A perfect storm of antebellum legal, technological, and commercial developments, coupled with the concentration of men fed into armies, created a demand for, and a deluge of, pornography in the military camps. Illicit materials entered in haversacks, through the mail, or from sutlers; soldiers found pornography discarded on the ground, and civilians discovered it in abandoned camps. Though few examples survived the war, these materials raised sharp concerns among reformers and lawmakers, who launched campaigns to combat it. By the war's end, a victorious, resurgent American nation-state sought to assert its moral authority by redefining human relations of the most intimate sort, including the regulation of sex and reproduction-most evident in the Comstock laws, a federal law and a series of state measures outlawing pornography, contraception, and abortion. With this book, Judith Giesberg has written the first serious study of the erotica and pornography that nineteenth-century American soldiers read and shared and links them to the postwar reaction to pornography and to debates about the future of sex and marriage.

Between 1900 and 1945, Britain and its empire experienced significant technological and social changes that altered its media and entertainment landscape. One aspect of British culture that underwent these changes was pornography. While illegal and socially reviled, the pornography trade adapted and flourished during this period. In The Thorny Path Jamie Stoops situates changes within the pornography trade in the context of an increasingly transnational world. Those who traded in pornography circled the globe, journeying from Britain to its colonies, from colonial holdings to continental Europe, from Europe to North America. In the process, pornographers and their customers developed new vocabularies and norms with which to negotiate their trade. Based on extensive archival research, this book grounds questions of transnationalism and heteronormativity in the day-to-day lives of low-level pornographers and consumers. Stoops's focus on street-level interactions within the trade is balanced with an analysis of state policies, legal regulations, and debates about obscenity, illustrating the interplay between enforcers of mainstream moral standards and those who represented deviant sexual practices. Raising questions of queerness and sexual normativity, The Thorny Path links these issues to contemporary conversations about pornography, obscenity, and sexuality. It offers timely historical context for current and vibrant debates surrounding marginalized sexualities, gender roles, and pornography in a time of rapid technological and social change.

In 1999, General Museveni, Uganda's autocratic leader, ordered police to arrest homosexuals for engaging in behavior he characterized as ""un-African"" and against Biblical teaching. A state-sanctioned campaign of harassment of LGBT people followed. With the approval of sections of Uganda's clergy (and the support of U.S. evangelicals) harsh morality laws were passed against pornography and homosexual acts. The former disproportionately affected urban women, curtailing their freedoms. The latter - known as the ""kill the gays bill"" - called for life imprisonment or capital punishment for homosexuals. The author weaves together a series of vignettes and anecdotes that trace the development of Uganda's morality laws against a backdrop of Machiavellian politics, religious fundamentalism and the human rights struggle of LGBT Ugandans.