Here are 93 books that Chasing Dirt fans have personally recommended if you like
Chasing Dirt.
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I’ve always been drawn to social history, so the chance to learn what people used for toilet paper in the middle ages or how deodorant was invented and popularized in the early 20th century was perfect for me. The three years I spent researching The Dirt on Clean included trips to see the bathing facilities in Pompeii and actually bathing in ancient mineral baths and spas in Hungary, Switzerland, and Germany, and what’s not to like about that?
A coffee table book, but a sublime one. If you want to read one book on this subject (after The Dirt on Clean, of course), The Book of the Bath is it. Not only is the text intelligent, comprehensive, and readable, it is sumptuously illustrated with paintings, photographs, and ads. Covering "The Story of Water", "Private Baths", "Public Bath"s, and "The Modern Bathroom", it concludes (perhaps because the author is French) with "The Sensual Delights of the Bath". Highly recommended.
For over 2000 years, in the Far East as in the West, bathing and showering have been more than practical necessities. Bathing has become a rite and a refuge, and this is the first book to lavish due attention on the history of the bath across the centuries and around the world.
Although the room for bathing as we know it has existed for only a century, public baths wee institution in ancient cultures; and, of course, beginning n the Renaissance, bathing was not just hygienic, but a sensual and sybaritic event. In The Book of the Bath, abundant illustrations-…
I’ve always been drawn to social history, so the chance to learn what people used for toilet paper in the middle ages or how deodorant was invented and popularized in the early 20th century was perfect for me. The three years I spent researching The Dirt on Clean included trips to see the bathing facilities in Pompeii and actually bathing in ancient mineral baths and spas in Hungary, Switzerland, and Germany, and what’s not to like about that?
Americans believe advertisements, especially those that promise cleanliness. Europeans, who are much less obsessed with soaps, deodorants, creams, and other cleansing products, find this naive. As described by Sivulka, Americans see ads for personal hygiene products as allies in their quest never to “offend,” to borrow one of advertising’s favorite words. Advertising and toilet soap (as opposed to laundry or housecleaning soap) grew up together, beginning in the late 19th century, and ads made brilliant use of Americans’ worries about finding Mr. Right and getting ahead in business. Sivulka’s enlightening book is copiously illustrated by a fascinating anthology of the ads themselves.
Only a century ago the privilege of washing with soap was mainly a special prerogative of the well to do, and a bath was something most people avoided. But by the end of World War I a revolution in standards of personal hygiene had taken place. Soap was not only more widely used but was suddenly viewed as a powerful symbol of purification, civilization, and progress. What caused this radical shift in attitudes?
In this fascinating cultural history, Juliann Sivulka shows that the transformation of soap from luxury product to everday staple and symbol of success was the result of…
I’ve always been drawn to social history, so the chance to learn what people used for toilet paper in the middle ages or how deodorant was invented and popularized in the early 20th century was perfect for me. The three years I spent researching The Dirt on Clean included trips to see the bathing facilities in Pompeii and actually bathing in ancient mineral baths and spas in Hungary, Switzerland, and Germany, and what’s not to like about that?
Ierley’s deftly researched and written book follows the evolution of heating, light, kitchens, and bathrooms in the American house from 1805 to the present, but the sections on bathing and bathrooms alone are worth the price of admission. His use of graphic charts is particularly enlightening: a standout is the history of comfort and convenience in the Eisenhower household of Abilene, Kansas (home of President Dwight Eisenhower), as it progresses from 1898 to the 1930s.
The Age of Technology is nowhere made more personal than at home. Modern convenience shapes our daily routine, making today's American house a place of comfort, the like of which has never been known. Yet of all aspects of modern technology, it is the evolution of what is in the household that has been least written about.
In The Comforts of Home, an unprecedented work written for a general audience with no particular knowledge of science or technology, social historian Merritt Ierley weaves in aspects of architecture, social history, and technology to present an underexplored but central feature of American…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
I’ve always been drawn to social history, so the chance to learn what people used for toilet paper in the middle ages or how deodorant was invented and popularized in the early 20th century was perfect for me. The three years I spent researching The Dirt on Clean included trips to see the bathing facilities in Pompeii and actually bathing in ancient mineral baths and spas in Hungary, Switzerland, and Germany, and what’s not to like about that?
Europeans had feared water since the Black Death of 1347 when the doctors of the Sorbonne pronounced that people who took warm baths were more susceptible to the plague. There followed what the French historian Jules Michelet called (with some hyperbole) “five hundred years without a bath.” Goubert’s scholarly but always readable book describes the gradual and tentative death of this longstanding myth. Beginning in the 18th century, the emergence of the idea of water as a benefit and not a danger to public health was complicated and touched many areas of life. Goubert is adept at moving from social to cultural to administrative sectors, with just the right balance of theory and anecdotes.
"The preoccupation with water is, according to Jean-Pierre Goubert, one of the subdivisions of the religion of progress. . . . Goubert's research is entirely interdisciplinary, and his procedure is highly original. The first in his field, the author has at all points built up a study which never departs from its faithfulness to texts, documents and facts."--From the introduction
This book is the first major study of the social and cultural conquest of water during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jean-Pierre Goubert discloses the changing meanings of everyday reality as he explores the transition from water-scarce cultures, in which…
I dig into family dramas of the past. But these dramas interest me most when I understand how personal stories intersected with the legal and policy structures that shaped what was possible for families. Overall, I am interested in the many ways that inequality—between races, genders, and classes—began at home. I am now working on a project on sex across class lines in the 20th century United States. I am an associate professor in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers-Newark.
Kathleen Brown’s brilliant book interrogates conflicting ideas about how to take care of our bodies as Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans encountered each other in colonial North America. One of the fundamental transformations she tracks is that western priorities about cleanliness shifted from “bathing the body to changing its linens” in the 16th century. This vastly increased women’s physical work and their political burdens.
Doing laundry involved hauling water, heating it, and then getting rid of that water. Women tried to alleviate the burdens of the back-breaking labor by using water over again and then throwing the dirty water into the street. This earned them frustration and even legal restrictions. For instance, colonial Jamestown offered allowances for doing the laundry properly and whippings or prisons for those who did not. Native Americans shunned English dress in part because it was so tough to keep it clean and lice-free. Subsequent…
In colonial times few Americans bathed regularly; by the mid-1800s, a cleanliness "revolution" had begun. Why this change, and what did it signify?
"It is the author's ability to appreciate and represent the almost tactile circumstantiality of life that makes Foul Bodies so special-and so readable."-Charles E. Rosenberg, author of Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now
"Brown has framed an intriguing new area of research and gathered a surprisingly rich source of textual evidence. Marvelous."-Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812
I'm enchanted by ecology – how life on Earth is both a web and a seamless continuum. In my first book, Corpse, I explored the organisms that colonize the human body after death. In Good Germs, Bad Germs, I immersed myself in our symbiotic relationship with the ever-present bacteria that live in us and on us. I’m passionate about understanding how we evolved to survive in a bacterial world and how we must take the long-term view of surviving – and thriving – in their ever-present embrace. My joy has been in exploring the world of science and translating this joy into lay-accessible stories that entertain as well as educate.
In Life on Man, the brilliant bacteriologist and renowned professor Theodor Rosebury became the first to introduce the public to the world of bacteria within and around them. He did so with irreverence and humor that shocked and delighted without sacrificing scientific accuracy and prudence. Though our understanding of the bacterial world has progressed light years since Life on Man was first published in 1969, it remains a classic. A must-read for everyone seriously interested in our personal microbiomes.
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
History is my passion as well as my profession. I love a good story! When I was teaching courses in environmental history and women’s history, I kept noticing the intriguing intersections, which inspired me to write Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers. Most of my work focuses on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1877-1920) and includes two award-winning biographies, Fighting Bob La Follette and Belle La Follette Progressive Era Reformer. I’m also the co-editor of A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and have written dozens of op-eds and give public talks (some of which can be found in the C-SPAN online library and on YouTube).
The environmental justice movement grew out of recognition of the disproportionate environmental burdens faced by low-income communities, including many communities of color. Zimring provides a detailed and compelling analysis of the long history of environmental racism that the environmental justice movement seeks to remedy. He reveals how ideas about race, hygiene, and waste have shaped where and how people (including Native Americans, immigrant groups, and African Americans) have lived and worked.
Clean and White offers a history of environmental racism in the United States focusing on constructions of race and hygiene
When Joe Biden attempted to compliment Barack Obama by calling him "clean and articulate," he unwittingly tapped into one of the most destructive racial stereotypes in American history. This book tells the history of the corrosive idea that whites are clean and those who are not white are dirty. From the age of Thomas Jefferson to the Memphis Public Workers strike of 1968 through the present day, ideas about race and waste have shaped where people have lived, where people…
I'm an author of books for young readers. These days, there’s nothing more important than having conversations about the Coronavirus disease. It can be hard for grown-ups to start a conversation about Covid with their kids. But they can read a book about the subject and invite the kids to respond to what they heard and saw. My book COVID-19 Helpers was the first place winner of the Emery Global Health Institute’s e-book contest back in May 2020. Through the pandemic, I’ve been reading and talking about the virus with kids from around the world. If you're interested in having me read one of my books to your school, clinic, or your daycare center feel free to get in touch.
The whimsical illustrations in this book caught my attention and captured my heart. The colors in this book are lovely pastels and the text is simple so there’s lots of room to admire the images. I am partial to picture books that are simple and emotional. As we continue on for so many months making the extra effort to wear masks in our daily lives, there’s something heartening in seeing pictures of other people happily wearing masks on the pages of this book. The text is written in sets of rhyming pairs, which are sometimes a stretch. I appreciate that this book for young readers shows a diverse group of people all merrily going about their tasks while wearing protective face masks.
We Wear Masks is a fun tool to help children make sense of this new reality and make wearing masks less scary and more relatable.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many children have been introduced to wearing face masks and seeing others in masks. Author and illustrator Marla Lesage normalizes mask-wearing by introducing young readers to artists, ranchers, pilots, welders, scientists and many more people who already wear masks in their day-to-day lives. This delightful, rhyming picture book will help explain to children why wearing a mask is important as we interact with others in our communities. Readers will learn that,…
I am a librarian and author living in San Francisco. Like many children, I grew up on dog books. I read and re-read Lassie Come Home and The Incredible Journey. James Herriot’s memoirs—many of which feature dogs—were my bedtime stories. Today, I often write about animals as a way to build empathy in child readers and teach the values of loyalty, kindness, and friendship. (My picture books include stories about dogs, alligators, wolves, and ducks!) Although I love a good cry over a book, I have chosen mostly happy books for this list of picture and middle-grade books about dogs. I hope the animal-loving child readers in your life enjoy them!
First published in 1956, Harry the Dirty Dog is still around and charming young readers. To avoid a bath, Harry buries the scrubbing brush in the yard and then runs away. He gets into entertaining scrapes and messes, eventually returning home so covered in dirt and soot that he is unrecognizable to his family. Panic! How will Harry convince his family that he is their missing pet? I read this on repeat to my kids when they were young, and today I also read it during library storytimes. The retro art is visually appealing and the story has just-high-enough stakes to keep kids glued to their seats.
Harry is a black and white dog who hates having a bath - so when he sees his owner with the dredded bath, he runs away. But in the end, harry gets so dirty that his owners dont recognise him and so he has to beg for the thing he used to dread so much so they let him back into the houshold.
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
The main reason I care about the relationship of war, conscience, and religion is because I believe strongly in the separation of church and state. A country’s methods of pursuing its best interests, include the use of power and warfare. Religions, however, make central: love your neighbor as much as you love yourself. People need to develop a conscience about what principle matters most. In the Civil War, the old tenet, an “eye for an eye,” was used to justify killing others for reasons of advantage or revenge. But I want to be involved instead in creating peace and justice for all.
America Aflamedemonstrates how people’s religious views impacted the extended length and divisiveness of the American Civil War. Both sides in the conflict thought God was on their side; they had to keep on fighting. And yet, some Northern Christians condemned slavery for its inhumanity, while some Southerners extolled slavery for its social benefits. In my historical fiction trilogy, I also show the tensions between war’s destructive methods and the religious beliefs of common citizens who refuse to fight. David Goldfield’s storytelling style of non-fiction writing captured my attention, whether describing the tone of this bold new country, or parsing the dueling natures of Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee.
In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second GreatAwakening surged through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death.
The price of that failure was horrific, but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the…
