Course Description

Instructor: Dr. Mandy Swygart-Hobaugh

Peters Street for wagon yards, Whitehall Street for stores, Peachtree Street for dressy feet, and Collins Street for..." This course introduces a mini-project within Dr. Mandy’s larger “Historic Harlots of Old Atlanta” project (https://lib.gsu.edu/historicharlots), detailing the rise and fall of Atlanta’s late-1800s-to-early-1900s prostitution district located within what today is the heart of Georgia State University’s campus. In this course, you’ll learn specifically about the “data of the demimonde” mined from Atlanta’s 1880, 1900, and 1910 censuses, including geographic origins, age, race, marital status, children born/living, and literacy rates among Atlanta’s madams and prostitutes of the era. We’ll critically examine the data within the sociohistorical contexts of class, gender, and racial politics of Atlanta, the South, and the broader US.

Bio:  Dr. Mandy Swygart-Hobaugh leads the Georgia State University Library's Research Data Services Department. She hails from the Hoosier state (Indiana), earning her Ph.D. in Sociology from Purdue University, where she focused her doctoral dissertation research on anti-prostitution crusades in Progressive-Era Chicago.