Tag Archives: history

A history of New York City’s solid waste management in photographs

By the nineteenth century, New York City was persistently and famously filthy. While other urban centers had begun to clean up their streets, approaching vessels could still smell New York far out to sea. Yet,  the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) was founded in 1881 as the Department of Street Cleaning and became one of the […]
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CFP: The Urban Economy: Networks, Flows and Place

12 International Conference on Urban History European Association for Urban History (EAUH) Portugal, Lisbon September 3-6, 2014 We invite everyone interested to submit a paper proposal (in the form of a 200 to 300-word abstract) for a conference session (M22) exploring the economic networks of cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The deadline for […]
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CFP: Ethics and Aesthetics of Epidemiological Photography

Saturday, 14 September 2013 Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Convener Dr Christos Lynteris (Mellon/Newton Research Fellow, CRASSH) Despite recent developments in the historical and anthropological study of medical photography, the photographic depiction of epidemics remains a largely unexplored area in the humanities and the […]
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The unspeakable matter

While we often post article alerts about new scholarship on garbage matters, I wanted to take a moment to re-visit Ellen Handy’s 1995 essay, “Dust Piles and Damp Pavements: Excrement, Repression, and the Victorian City in Photography and Literature.”  First of all, thank you Ellen Handy for introducing readers to Thomas Annan’s enduring work (see “Dust […]
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Waste and Capitalism

Last night’s presentation of Surveying Waste and Capital at Trade School (NYC), lead by CUNY doctoral candidate Jesse Goldstein included a historical narrative starting in England during the enclosure movement and how the “wasteland,” originally referring to productive pasture and foraging land on the outskirts of a village’s agricultural fields, was reframed as “wasted spaces” […]
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Surveying Waste and Capital @ Trade School, NYC

I’ve posted about the classes at Trade School before. It’s a barter-based, pop-up educational initiative that started in New York City and how has versions all over the world. It is open to anyone, and students “pay” their instructor based on what needs the instructor has listed: baked goods, editorial help, rolling pins, and help […]
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CFP: Definitions of Power: Units, Ideas, and Images in the History of Energy

The Energy History Project at the Joint Center for History and Economics is soliciting paper proposals for its upcoming workshop on *November 18th, 2011 at Harvard University.* This workshop is part of an ongoing series of events on the global and comparative history of energy. The workshop seeks to explore changes in the depiction, understanding, […]
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