City Water, City Life
Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago
344 pages
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31 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2013
A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas that are a support for the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created the city. In City Water, City Life, celebrated historian Carl Smith explores this concept through an insightful examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s. By examining the place of water in the nineteenth-century consciousness, Smith illuminates how city dwellers perceived themselves during the great age of American urbanization. But City Water, City Life is more than a history of urbanization. It is also a refreshing meditation on water as a necessity, as a resource for commerce and industry, and as an essential—and central—part of how we define our civilization.
Michael Rawson, author of Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston
"A fascinating history of the ideas about nature, health, citizenship, and time that informed the construction of some of America’s earliest and greatest water systems. By demonstrating that our urban aqueducts are built out of ideas as much as bricks and mortar, Carl Smith ensures that a simple glass of water will never seem so simple again."
Cecelia Tichi, Vanderbilt University
“A crucially important new chapter in US urban history. With impeccable research, Carl Smith seamlessly synthesizes nineteenth-century issues of politics, engineering, finance, aesthetics, law, and medicine—all focused on the creation of water systems in three major cities and all coalescing around the idea of the greater good of the public at large. City Water, City Life speaks from history to this contemporary moment when the United States confronts, yet again, the debate over public versus private control of its water.”
Joel A. Tarr, Carnegie Mellon University
“A wonderfully perceptive book that provides new insights into the development and implications of water supply in Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Readers will find especially valuable Carl Smith’s use of cultural, environmental, and health-related frames to construct an ‘infrastructure of ideas’ relating to water.”
Martin V. Melosi, author of The Sanitary City
“What a nuanced treatment of water! In City Water, City Life, Carl Smith breathes new life into our understanding of the impact of water supply through his study of Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. While we know a great deal about the systems themselves and how they were developed, Smith focuses on transcendent qualities of water befitting its central role in our lives. As such, he has expanded the audience who will derive a great deal of satisfaction from this study.”
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: City Water, City Life
2 The River, the Aqueduct, and the Lake: Bringing Water to Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago
3 The Individual and the Collective: Water, Urban Society, and the Public Good
4 Nature and Art: Water and the Reconciliation of the Natural and the Urban
5 The Urban Body and the Body of the City: The Sanitary Movement, the Temperance Crusade, and the Water Cure
6 The Flow of Time
7 Epilogue
2 The River, the Aqueduct, and the Lake: Bringing Water to Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago
3 The Individual and the Collective: Water, Urban Society, and the Public Good
4 Nature and Art: Water and the Reconciliation of the Natural and the Urban
5 The Urban Body and the Body of the City: The Sanitary Movement, the Temperance Crusade, and the Water Cure
6 The Flow of Time
7 Epilogue
Notes
Index
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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History: American History | Urban History
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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