Pests in the city : flies, bedbugs, cockroaches, and rats
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Pests in the city : flies, bedbugs, cockroaches, and rats
（Weyerhaeuser environmental books）
University of Washington Press, c2013
- : [pbk.]
- Other Title
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Pests in the city : flies, bedbugs, cockroaches, & rats
Available at 1 libraries
Note
Bibliography: p. 279-308
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
From tenements to alleyways to latrines, twentieth-century American cities created spaces where pests flourished and people struggled for healthy living conditions. In Pests in the City, Dawn Day Biehler argues that the urban ecologies that supported pests were shaped not only by the physical features of cities but also by social inequalities, housing policies, and ideas about domestic space.
Community activists and social reformers strived to control pests in cities such as Washington, DC, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and Milwaukee, but such efforts fell short when authorities blamed families and neighborhood culture for infestations rather than attacking racial segregation or urban disinvestment. Pest-control campaigns tended to target public or private spaces, but pests and pesticides moved readily across the porous boundaries between homes and neighborhoods.
This story of flies, bedbugs, cockroaches, and rats reveals that such creatures thrived on lax code enforcement and the marginalization of the poor, immigrants, and people of color. As Biehler shows, urban pests have remained a persistent problem at the intersection of public health, politics, and environmental justice, even amid promises of modernity and sustainability in American cities.
Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG9PFxLY7K4&feature=c4-overview&list=UUge4MONgLFncQ1w1C_BnHcw
Table of Contents
Foreword by William Cronon
Acknowledgments
Introduction: History, Ecology, and the Politics of Pests
Part One
The Promises of Modern Pest Control
1. Flies: Agents of Interconnection in Progressive Era Cities
2. Bedbugs: Creatures of Community in Modernizing Cities
3. German Cockroaches: Permeable Homes in the Postwar Era
4. Norway Rats: Back-Alley Ecology in the Chemical Age
Part Two
Persistence and Resistance in the Age of Ecology
5. The Ecology of Injustice: Rats in the Civil Rights Era
6. Integrating Urban Homes: Cockroaches and Survival
Epilogue: The Persistence and Resurgence of Bedbugs
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"