Peter Thorsheim is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
“I have no doubt that Inventing Pollution will remain the best text
in its field for many years.”
*Mark Cioc, author of The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000*
“Drawing on an impressive range of source materials, including some
excellent photographs, cartoons and advertisements, this concise
and clearly-written study explores public understandings of air
pollution in Britain over the past two centuries.”
“A well crafted and engaging book...Thorsheim demonstrates a level
of knowledge about the relevant policies, technologies, and
industries that is first rate.... Anybody interested in the story
of how an industrial society learned to manage its interactions
with the physical environment would benefit from reading Inventing
Pollution.
*Business History Review*
“Inventing Pollution [is] somewhere between timely and timeless. It
is a valuable contribution to the history of energy and the
environment, as well as the sociology of science and
policy-making.”
*Michael Lynch*
"Inventing Pollution is a valuable reminder that air pollution was
causing environmental, medical, and political controversies long
before it became a focus for protests and regulations in the 1960s.
By tracing the many responses to 'smoke pollution' in the first
industrial nation over the past two centuries, Peter Thorsheim has
established himself as a leading environmental historian of modern
Britain. His book will be of wide interest on both sides of the
Atlantic."
*William Cronon, author of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists,
and the Ecology of New England and Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the
Human Place in Nature*
“The chapters devoted to the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries set a new standard for our understanding of how, in
technological, legislative, and local regulatory terms, the
behemoth of nineteenth-century smoke fog came gradually to be
tamed, only to be replaced by new collective fears of invisible
emissions from new industrial processes...and the (pages on the)
final great smog crisis of 1952 are rooted in exemplary
scholarship, argument, and interpretation.”
*The Journal of British Studies*
“Thorsheim tells us about the transition from organic effluvia as
sources of ill-health to a fixation of coal smoke both in terms of
scientific understandings, of the purely administrative responses
and of the painfully slow progress of legislation.”
*American Historical Review*
“Thorsheim makes excellent use of visual material—including
photographs, posters, and cartoons from Punch—to illustrate his
arguments.”
*Journal of Modern History*
“Thorsheim’s arguments are provocative and compelling.... (He) is
to be applauded for bringing this disturbing history to our
attention.”
*Victorian Studies*
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
