Opening book details…
Can I read The Dirt on Clean : An Unsanitized History on EtoBox?
The Dirt on Clean : An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg is a history book available to read on EtoBox.
What is The Dirt on Clean : An Unsanitized History about?
<p><b>A spirited chronicle of the West's ambivalent relationship with dirt </b><br><br>The question of cleanliness is one every age and culture has answered with confidence. For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, scraping the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the aristocratic Frenchman in the seventeenth century, it meant changing your shirt once a day and perhaps going so far as to dip your hands in some water. Did Napoleon know something we didn't when he wrote Josephine "I will return in five days. Stop washing"? And why is the German term <i>Warmduscher</i>—a man who washes in warm or hot water—invariably a slight against his masculinity? Katherine Ashenburg takes on such fascinating questions as these in <i>Dirt on Clean</i>, her charming tour of attitudes to hygiene through time.<br><br>What could be more routine than taking up soap and water and washing yourself? And yet cleanliness, or the lack of it, is intimately connected to ideas as large as spirituality and sexuality, and historical events that include plagues, the Civil War, and the discovery of germs. An engrossing fusion of erudi
Who reads The Dirt on Clean : An Unsanitized History?
It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.
Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.
- Author
- Katherine Ashenburg
- Publisher
- St. Martin's Press
- Published
- 2014
- Language
- EN
- ISBN
- 9780374531379
- Category
- history
- Subjects
- Anthropology, Fiction, Science
- Rating
- 3.69 / 5 (128 ratings)
- Updated
- 2026-03-14