Overview

"In the second half of the nineteenth century, American cities began to go dark. Hulking new buildings overspread blocks, pollution obscured the skies, and glass and smog screened out the health-giving rays of the sun. Doctors fed anxities about these new conditions with claims about a rising tide of the ""diseases of darkness,"" especially rickets and tuberculosis. In American Sunshine, Daniel Freund  tracks the obsession with sunlight from those bleak days into the twentieth century.  Before long, social reformers, medical professionals, scientists, and a growing nudist movement proffered remedies for America’s new dark age. Architects, city planners, and politicians made access to sunlight central to public housing and public health. and entrepreneurs, dairymen, and tourism boosters transformed the pursuit of sunlight and its effects into a commodity. Within this historical context, Freund sheds light on important questions about the commodification of health and nature and makes an original contribution to the histories of cities, consumerism, the environment, and medicine."

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9780226262819

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An erudite and often witty study of how natural light became a precious resource in an urbanizing and industrializing America: something to be measured and commodified; something so crucial to health that its loss to towering apartments, narrow streets, and smoky skies had to be mitigated by an impressive array of artificial means, from cod-liver oil and vitamin-fortified milk, to sunlamps and special window glass. (Christian Warren, Brooklyn College, City University of New York)

"""An erudite and often witty study of how natural light became a precious resource in an urbanizing and industrializing America: something to be measured and commodified; something so crucial to health that its loss to towering apartments, narrow streets, and smoky skies had to be mitigated by an impressive array of artificial means, from cod-liver oil and vitamin-fortified milk, to sunlamps and special window glass."" (Christian Warren, Brooklyn College, City University of New York)"""

Author Information

Daniel Freund is assistant professor of social sciences at Bard High School Early College.

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