BackStory

The following is a list of sources used or consulted in the making of the BackStory episode, “Rinse and Repeat: Cleanliness in America,” broadcast in February 2013.  You can listen to the entire episode here.

Mentioned On the Show:

Egan, Kristen.  “Conservation and Cleanliness: Racial and Environmental Purity in Ellen Richards and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.”  WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 39.3 (2011): 77-92.

Marshall, Jennifer.  “Clean Cuts: Proctor & Gamble’s Depression-Era Soap Carving Contests.”  Winterthur Portfolio 42.1 (2008): 51-76.

Sudduth, Charletta, et al. The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012.

Whooley, Owen.  Knowledge in a Time of Cholera: The Struggle Over American Medicine in the 19th Century. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2013.

On the Web:

The Ugly Girl Papers: or, Hints for the Toilet.  Hygiene tips for women, 1874.  Includes such articles as “Artistic Enthusiasm at the Toilet,” “Experiments in Bathing,” and — thank goodness — “Hope for Homely People.”

“How to Shampoo the Hair,” New York Times article, 1908.

The Economist gives a rundown on filth.

Salon talks with Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Dirt on Clean.

A history of toilet paper.

Additional Reading

Ashenburg, Katherine. The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, New York: North Point Press, 2008.

Brown, Kathleen.  Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America.  New Haven: Yale University Press,  2009.

Bushman, Claudia and Bushman, Richard.  “An Early History of Cleanliness in America.”  Journal of American History 74.4 (1988): 1213-1238.

Campkin and Cox, Eds. Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination, London: I. B. Tauris, 2013.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge, 1966.

Freidenfelds, Lara.  The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Hoy, Suellen. Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Johnson, Steven.  The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.  London: Riverhead Books, 2007.

Melosi, Martin.  The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Nagle, Robin.  Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City.  New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2013.

Rogers, Heather.  Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage.   New York: The New Press, 2005.

Rosenberg, Charles. The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Royte, Elizabeth.  Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. New York: Back Bay Books, 2006.

Vinikas, Vincent.  Soft Soap, Hard Sell: American Hygiene in an Age of Advertisement.  Ames: Iowas State University Press, 1992.