About
Alexandra M. Lord received her BA from Vassar College and her PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After winning the Shryock Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine, she was awarded the J. Elliot Royer Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the History of Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. An active scholar, she has been the recipient of various grants and awards throughout her career, including, most recently, a Fulbright Research Fellowship (2021). In 2010, the British Medical Association awarded her book, Condom Nation: A History of Federally Funded Sex Education from World War I to the Internet, its award for the best popular book on medicine.
Lexi is the daughter and descendant of multiple individuals who chose to end their own lives. In 2020, she returned to a research project she began decades ago, a study of the history of suicide. This new project, a book entitled Bridge: The Afterlife of Suicide in an American Family, 1890-2022, uses her family’s multi-generational story of suicide to explore an uncomfortable reality at the heart of American culture: suicide and the violence it does to families. Bridge debunks some of our most stubborn myths and misconceptions about suicide, including its frequency and meaning across time.
Her writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Baltimore Sun among other places.
Featured Work
Condom Nation: The U.S. Government's Sex Education Campaign from World War I to the Internet
Since launching its first sex ed program during World War I, the Public Health Service has dominated American sex education. Yet its campaigns have been haphazard, ad hoc and often ineffective.
Drawing on medical research, news reports, the expansive records of the Public Health Service, and interviews with former surgeons general, Alexandra M. Lord explores how federal officials struggled to create sex education programs that balanced cultural and public health concerns. In the process, Lord explains how tensions among these organizations and local, state, and federal officials often exacerbated existing controversies about sexual behavior. She also discusses why the Public Health Service's promotional tactics sometimes inadvertently fueled public fears about the federal government’s goals in promoting, or not promoting, sex education.
Thoroughly documented and compelling, Condom Nation provides new insights into one of the most contested subjects in America.
