Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Prostitution in Civil-War Nashville,” a look at sex workers and brothels in the city during a time of strife, with Brandon Hulette, epidemiologist and military historian at Vanderbilt University.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7.]

For all of the revelry found on its streets at night, today’s Nashville is tame in comparison to the Nashville of the early 1860s, where abundant sex workers and brothels catered to soldiers in a time of war.

Come learn about Nashville’s “fancy women,” infamous Smokey Row red-light district, and struggles to regulate prostitution and contain huge outbreaks of venereal disease from Professor Brandon Hulette, a military historian and epidemiologist who has extensively researched this chapter of the city’s history. As the city prepares to commemorate the 160th anniversary of the Battle of Nashville, it’s the perfect talk to convey how thoroughly the Civil War changed the city.

To set the stage, Professor Hulette will describe how by 1863 Nashville was the most strategically important city in the western theater of the American Civil War, with thousands of soldiers and millions of dollars’ worth of supplies passing through enroute to battlefields of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Georgia. Many of the young men passing through were away from home for the first time and looking for a chance to eat, drink, and be merry before facing an uncertain future in Civil War’s killing fields. A booming bar and prostitution industry developed to cater to their desires.

One consequence was the rampant spread of sexually transmitted diseases, with the infection rate at one point soaring to up to 40 percent of soldiers in the city. The Union Army, which had occupied the city since early 1862, tried to squelch prostitution through law-enforcement crackdowns and even by forcing sex workers to board a riverboat headed out of the city.

After making little headway with such efforts, the city opted to legalize and regulate prostitution, a daring social experiment that paid off with a sharp drop in infection rates. Legal brothels proliferated, enabling people to build business from the once-illicit trade.

Professor Hulette will describe how all of this came to be, tell the stories of the people involved, and point out locations in Nashville where legal prostitution took place. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A Victorian postcard.