Books written by Benjamin Reiss

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  Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World

  In lyrical prose, he leads readers from bedrooms and laboratories to factories and battlefields to Henry David Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden Pond, telling the stories of troubled sleepers, hibernating peasants, sleepwalking preachers, ...

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  Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture

  Their frequently clashing views turned practically all of American culture—from blackface minstrel shows to the works of William Shakespeare—into a battlefield in the war on insanity.

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  Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World

  In lyrical prose, he leads readers from bedrooms and laboratories to factories and battlefields to Henry David Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden Pond, telling the stories of troubled sleepers, hibernating peasants, sleepwalking preachers, ...

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  The Showman and the Slave

  Reiss uses P. T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the contours of race relations in the antebellum North.

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  Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture

  Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People's History of the Mass Market Book (New York: Routledge, 2005), xx. For a compelling study of the function of cultural reformation in one nonelite ...

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  Keywords for Disability Studies

  Each of the 60 essays in Keywords for Disability Studies focuses on a distinct critical concept, including “ethics,” “medicalization,” “performance,” “reproduction,” “identity,” and “stigma,” among others.

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  The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America

  The author recreates one of the great hoaxes of the nineteenth century--P.T. Barnum's exhibition of Joice Heth, a slave woman who claimed to be the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington.

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  Keywords for Disability Studies

  Each of the 60 essays in Keywords for Disability Studies focuses on a distinct critical concept, including “ethics,” “medicalization,” “performance,” “reproduction,” “identity,” and “stigma,” among others.

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  Keywords for Disability Studies

  Each of the 60 essays in Keywords for Disability Studies focuses on a distinct critical concept, including “ethics,” “medicalization,” “performance,” “reproduction,” “identity,” and “stigma,” among others.