Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash - Susan Strasser

Condition : Good.
Henry Holt, 2004, Large-format Paperback - History - 355pp. ISBN 9780805065121.
Winner of the Abel Wolman Award of the Public Works Historical Society
An unprecedented look at that most commonplace act of everyday lifethrowing things outand how it has transformed American society.
Susan Strassers pathbreaking histories of housework and the rise of the mass market have become classics in the literature of consumer culture. Here she turns to an essential but neglected part of that culturethe trash it producesand finds in it an unexpected wealth of meaning.
Before the twentieth century, streets and bodies stank, but trash was nearly nonexistent. With goods and money scarce, almost everything was reused. Strasser paints a vivid picture of an America where scavenger pigs roamed the streets, swill children collected kitchen garbage, and itinerant peddlers traded manufactured goods for rags and bones. Over the last hundred years, however, Americans have become hooked on convenience, disposability, fashion, and constant technological changethe rise of mass consumption has led to waste on a previously unimaginable scale.
Lively and colorful, Waste and Want recaptures a hidden part of our social history, vividly illustrating that what counts as trash depends on whos counting, and that what we throw away defines us as much as what we keep.
Waste and Want shows to startling effect how radically both our notions of trash and our means of coping with it have altered over the years. The Washington Post
[A] vibrant social history of American attitudes toward superfluous or unusable material items. . . . The book spills over with fascinating facts. Publishers Weekly
Strasser reads our American history in our tea leavesand countless tons of other domestic garbageas she traces the changing meanings of waste and thrift from Colonial times to the present. The Boston Globe

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