How increased access to ice—decades before refrigeration—transformed American life.During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans depended upon ice to stay cool and to keep their perishable foods fresh. Jonathan Rees tells the fascinating story of how people got ice before mechanical refrigeration came to the household. Drawing on newspapers, trade journals, and household advice books, Before the Refrigerator explains how Americans built a complex system to harvest, store, and transport ice to everyone who wanted it, even the very poor.Rees traces the evolution of the natural ice industry from its mechanization in the 1880s through its gradual collapse, which started after World War I. Meatpackers began experimenting with ice refrigeration to ship their products as early as the 1860s. Starting around 1890, large, bulky ice machines the size of small houses appeared on the scene, becoming an important source for the American ice supply. As ice machines shrunk, more people had access to better ice for a wide variety of purposes. By the early twentieth century, Rees writes, ice had become an essential tool for preserving perishable foods of all kinds, transforming what most people ate and drank every day. Reviewing all the inventions that made the ice industry possible and the way they worked together to prevent ice from melting, Rees demonstrates how technological systems can operate without a central controlling force. Before the Refrigerator is ideal for history of technology classes, food studies classes, or anyone interested in what daily life in the United States was like between 1880 and 1930.
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PrefaceIntroduction1. How to Harvest Ice2. How to Manufacture Ice3. How Ice (and the Perishable Food It Preserved) Made It to Consumers4. How Ice Changed the American Diet and American Life5. How Household Refrigerators Changed the Ice Market ForeverConclusionAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
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In Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice, Jonathan Rees provides a rich and detailed history of how ice became an American staple . . . Rees does a masterful job illustrating how, in its rise and fall, the ice industry created many industry alliances and consumer habits that are still with us today. Ice has become a taken-for-granted feature of modern living. This book is the story of how that came to be.—Xaq Frohlich, Auburn University, Journal of Southern History
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Before the Refrigerator is accessible, offers a unique insight that sheds light on a simple—at least at first glance—historical question, and includes multiple stories that will draw students into the subject. Well-written and backed up by ample evidence, the book is a welcome addition to the How Things Worked series.—Sean Patrick Adams, author of Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century
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How increased access to ice—decades before refrigeration—transformed American life.

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781421424590
Publisert
2018-04-26
Utgiver
Vendor
Johns Hopkins University Press
Vekt
204 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Dybde
9 mm
Aldersnivå
U, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
136

Forfatter

Biographical note

Jonathan Rees is a professor of history at Colorado State University–Pueblo. He is the author of Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America and Refrigerator.