The expansion of the Paris sewer system during the Second Empire and Third Republic was both a technological and political triumph. The sewers themselves were an important cultural phenomenon, and the men who worked in them a source of fascination. Donald Reid shows that observing how such laborers as cesspool cleaners and sewermen present themselves and are represented by others is a way to reflect on the material and cultural foundations of everyday life.
For bourgeois urbanites, the sewer became the repository of latent anxieties about disease, disorder, and anarchy. The sewermen...
The expansion of the Paris sewer system during the Second Empire and Third Republic was both a technological and political triumph. The sewers them...
The essays in this book, like all other texts, have been written in a historical context that shapes both the themes and the prose styles of the authors. A close reading of these texts would in fact lead to many overlapping contexts of politics, social hierarchies, modern communications, and international relations, but we want to focus briefly on two contextual influences that carry the most obvious connections to this book: the wide-ranging public debate about the proper curriculum for American schools and universities, and the more specific debate among historians about new trends in...
The essays in this book, like all other texts, have been written in a historical context that shapes both the themes and the prose styles of the autho...
