Name: Shoddy: From Devil's Dust to the Renaissance of Rags, Hardcover/Hanna Rose Shell
Brand: University of Chicago Press
Price: 158.99 RON
Availability: InStock

Descriere & specificații

The history of modern-day old clothes recycling begins with a thing called shoddy . Starting in the early 1800s, shoddy was the name given to a new material made from reclaimed wool, and to one of the earliest forms of industrial recycling. Old rags and leftover fabric clippings were ground to bits by a machine known as "the devil" and then re-used. Usually undisclosed, shoddy-also known as reworked wool-became suit jackets, army blankets, mattress stuffing, and much more. Shoddy is the afterlife of rags. And Shoddy, the book, reveals hidden worlds of textile intrigue. In Shoddy: From Devil's Dust to the Renaissance of Rags , Hanna Rose Shell takes readers on a journey to discover shoddy, from Haiti to the "shoddy towns" of West Yorkshire in England, to the United States, back in time to the British cholera epidemics and the American Civil War, and into agricultural fields, textile labs, and rag-shredding factories. Shell's narrative is both literary and historical, drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, from court cases to military uniforms, mattress labels to medical textbooks, political cartoons to high art. Shoddy moves between genres, bringing richly drawn characters and unexpected objects to life. Along the way, shoddy becomes equally an evocative object and a portal into another world. Almost since the time it first appeared, shoddy was both ubiquitous and controversial. In part because it was often so hard to detect, it was inherently suspicious. Public health