Americans in the early 19th century were, as one foreign traveller bluntly put it, "filthy, bordering on the beastly"--perfectly at home in dirty, bug-infested,

In this classic work Mary Douglas identifies the concern for pirity as a key theme at the heart of every society. She reveals its wide-ranging impact on our att

Machines for Living shows how the modernization of the home led to profound changes in domestic life and relied on a set of emergent concepts, including standar