Brown Bag Lecture: “The Smell Detectives: Chemists and the Public Nose in the Industrializing City”
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Date:
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October 5, 2010
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Time:
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12:00 to 1:00 p.m.
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Location:
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CHF
315 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106 |
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Open to the Public |
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Fee:
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Free
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A talk by Melanie Kiechle
Join the smelling committees of Chicago and New York as they endeavored to find the sources of “intolerable, pestilence-breeding stench” in the 1860s and 1880s. Within the framework of city government and the nascent public health movement, did chemists have a voice and the ability to change the air? Or were elected officials more swayed by public noses than official ones?
Melanie Kiechle is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Rutgers University, where she focuses on 19th-century cultural history of the United States. Her dissertation, “The Air We Breathe: 19th-Century Americans and the Search for Fresh Air,” is a cultural history of “fresh air” and foul odors, as both were defined and refined in New York, Chicago and Boston between 1840 and 1900.
This project encompasses her interests in sensory history, experiential knowledge, the development of the urban/rural divide, and the fields of urban, environmental, and public-health history. It also has introduced her to new interests in the development of chemistry, the use of nosegays, aromatic gardening, eucalyptus trees, and nuisance law, to name a few. Keichle is a 2010–2011 Haas Fellow at CHF.
About Brown Bag Lectures
Brown Bag Lectures (BBLs) are a series of weekly, informal talks by CHF fellows and members of the academic and business communities on topics involving the history of chemistry, political and social issues of importance to chemists and chemical engineers, and issues affecting the future of chemical research.
For more information, please call 215.873.8289, or e-mail bbl@chemheritage.org.