155: Martin Melosi's Sanitary City

In The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, Martin Melosi shows that the technologies chosen for a city's sanitation infrastructure depended heavily on the prevailing environmental concerns, available technologies, money, and politics of the day.  Because most American sanitation systems were built around the turn-of-the-century, when permanence was more valued than flexibility, and because this infrastructure is costly (socially, politically, functionally, economically) to replace outright, American sanitation systems are path dependent in that they are constrained by choices made early in their construction, and they are also determinist in the sense that they shape/ constrain development around them.  Melosi thus argues that "to function effectively the American city has to be a sanitary city."

Working from the water management systems in several major American cities, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, Melosi traces the development of sanitation infrastructure through three phases:

• The "Age of Miasmas" (colonial times to 1880): basically, if you can't see or smell it, it isn't there; dilution of waste water will purify it.  

148: Howard Segal's Technologial Utopianism

In Technological Utopianism in American Culture, Howard Segal argues that a strain of utopian literature produced in American between 1833 and 1933 firmly linked human improvement to technology.  While technological utopianism may have been a marginal thread in popular culture, it had a huge influence on both European and American intellectuals' thoughts on technology and American movements like scientific management, the conservation movement, and technocracy.  In tracing the careers and writings of 25 American technological utopians, Segal hopes to make their ideas more accessible and also to show that utopianism is a useful tool for social criticism.

According to Segal, American technological utopianism has four unique characteristics that distinguish it from other utopian traditions:

• technological utopians envision a world very similar to the one in which they live; the difference is more quantitative than qualitative
• versus Europe, America in the 19th century was perceived as a place where utopia could still be built
• American technological utopians were less revolutionary and more practical than their European counterparts
• these writers used utopianism not to fantasize about the future but to critique and suggest improvements for present-day society.

120: Yi-Fu Tuan's Topophilia

Yi-Fu Tuan's Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values argues that because humans are the "ecological dominant," understanding the environment requires first understanding human behavior in depth, so that we can see how our attitudes, beliefs, passions and values shape and are shaped by the environment.  This claim that human perception and experience is an important component of the environment and a valid geographical topic is in direct response to the scientific reductionism of post-WWII geography; it seeks to bring human culture back into the "practical" study of the environment by putting "topophilia," or "the affective bond between people and place or setting," at the center of geographic research.

Although Topophilia intentionally does not have a stated method, it does have a theoretical framework.  Tuan sets out to examine environmental perception and values at the levels of the species, group, and individual; to hold culture (or topophilia) distinct from the environment to show how

99: Domosh & Seager's Putting Women in Place

In Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World, Mona Domosh and Joni Seager show that space and place are both gendered and integral to the construction of gender.  In providing an overview of feminist geographical scholarship (up to 2001), they argue that this gendering has historically (and is currently) integral to processes of segregation, dominance, and resistance, in places like work and home as well as in the actions of everyday life.  Further, they situate this discussion of gender and geography within both local urban historical geographies in Western Europe and the US AND a structural analysis of global gender issues.  Their book is divided into six parts:

Home: history and analysis of a space almost universally associated with women.  Focusing on England and the US form the 17th century on, they show how the emerging capitalist system separated the male world of production from the female world of reproduction, from the Victorian cult of domesticity to mid-century suburbia.  They then interrogate the raced and classed connections between notions of domesticity and turn-of-the-century social engineering projects aimed at "Americanizing" urban working-class and immigrant women and rural Native American women.

68: Elizabeth Engelhardt's Tangled Roots of Feminism

In The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature, Elizabeth Engelhardt situates close readings of the writings of turn-of-the-century Appalachian women within their social, political, cultural, and geographical context.  While this project does work to recover these writings, many of which live in regional college archives and have never been published, it also shows  how Appalachia's women writers and activists at the turn of the last century "defined a philosophy of living that can help address social and environmental justice issues" that may be applicable today.  The book thus examines the "tangled roots" of women's writing, the environments in which they lived, and their connection to place in terms of "ecological feminism."

 The basic premise of ecological feminism is that there is no separation between humans and nature.  Humans and non-humans have a reciprocal relationship, where "self-Other" is replaced with "self-another" and both parties must take care of one another and help preserve the total ecology.  As the least-empowered in society, women can and must look out for the least-empowered in the total ecological system.  Therefore, all feminist activism must lead to long-term community stability, both environmentally and socially.  Ecological feminism in Appalachian women's writing thus led to critiques of capitalism and American corporations, as well as of any social structures that used hierarchies (race, gender, class, species, etc) to oppress, silence, or damage community members.  In defining ecological feminism, Engelhardt is careful to note that this is not an essentialist project; feminism and turn-of-the-century womanhood were not the same for all women, and activism took many historically specific forms.

36: Virginia Anderson's Creatures of Empire

In Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, Virginia Anderson argues that in seventeenth-century Chesapeake and New England, domestic animals put English settlers and Native Americans into close contact and thus actively shaped the history of early America and settler/ native relations.  By putting livestock at the center of early American history, Anderson contributes to a growing body of literature in animal studies, which, like environmental history, decenters human historical agency by elevating the broader environmental context.  Because colonists and Indians related to animals very differently and because these relationships had a huge impact on the landscape, focusing on animals also allows Anderson to investigate the imposition of one worldview over another in a holistic way.

Anderson divides her book into three sections: a discussion of the many ways Algonquians and English settlers thought about different kinds of animals at the beginning of the 17th century; a history of the introduction of livestock into the Chesapeake colonies and New England and the development of regional husbandry practices; and a comparison of two near-simultaneous conflicts in the 1670s, Bacon's rebellion and King Philip's War, with an emphasis on the relationship between disputes over livestock and the outbreak of violence in both regions.  Building on Bill Cronon's Changes in the Land, she argues that the English settlers sought to turn the New World into England, which included imposing their view of animals as property on the landscape and on Native Americans.  There were regional differences: Chesapeake farmers, with tobacco as their cash crop, let pigs and other animal run free and go semi-feral; New England farmers, who had to deal with colder climates and rocky soils, ran family farms rather than large plantations, and kept a closer eye on their herds.  However, in both regions, Native American responses to new animals and practices ranged from cautious acceptance of pigs (which seemed like deer or dogs) to outright rejection of environmental destruction by animals.

In some ways, this book is a continuation of the spatial turn in American Studies: English attitudes toward animals were closely linked to their attitudes about property, and Algonquian attitudes toward animals were linked to their more holistic view of humans, animals, and the environment, so disputes over animals spatialize and materialize conflicting worldviews.  By broadening the concept of agency to include environmental and non-human actors, it also presents a more contextual (and thus possibly more complete and less biased, or at least differently biased) history of early America.