The earliest known American sampler was made by Loara Standish of the Plymouth Colony about 1645. By the 1700s, samplers depicting alphabets and numerals were worked by young women to learn the basic ...

In the 1700s, the famous seducer Giacomo Casanova told of using half a lemon rind as a cervical cap. In pre-industrial America, women used homemade herbal douches to prevent pregnancy. If a ...