Sustainability Faculty Participate in the American Historical Association Annual Meeting

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The American Historical Association’s annual meeting came to Chicago this January, assembling the largest collection of professional historians in the United States for a weekend of discussing a wide variety of historical topics. While Roosevelt’s Sustainability Studies program has broadly interdisciplinary faculty, two of our faculty who are historians participated in the conference.

Professor Brad Hunt tapped his considerable expertise on Chicago’s public housing in a pre-conference tour Wednesday, January 4 .

Professor Carl Zimring  presented the poster “Race, Soap, and Environmental Inequalities in Gilded-Age America” on Saturday January 7 focusing on one aspect of his current book project Clean and White. The poster built

upon the literature arguing that racial discrimination produces inequities in how people experience the environment (including exposure to hazards, public health services and aesthetic amenities such as parks) by arguing that ideals of clean environments have shaped constructions of race in the United States. Assessing people as clean or dirty depending on racial identity became more common in the years after the Civil War. In turn, these attitudes about racial hygiene informed the reorganization of the American environment in the early twentieth century, shaping how waste management systems operated and how private and public real estate markets segregated housing. With fears of dirt, disease, and degeneracy established, American ideas of hygiene created a racist assumption cleanliness depended upon race, with whites the cleanest and most advanced people possible. This was articulated in many ways, including advertisements for soaps and cleansers distributed widely throughout the United States between 1880 and 1914[...] The poster is part of a larger research project about the development of whiteness and environmental racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Professors Hunt and Zimring are just two of the faculty teaching sustainability courses at Roosevelt. Visit our faculty page to learn more about these teachers. If you are a currently-enrolled Roosevelt University student interested in taking one or more Sustainability Studies courses, please get in touch with your academic advisor.  If you are not currently a Roosevelt University student, we encourage you to investigate our degree options, and our course listings. For more information, please visit our Sustainability Studies website, call 1-877-277-5978 (1-877-APPLY RU) or email applyRU@roosevelt.edu .