E.P. Thompson, the ‘New Left’ social historian of seventeenth and eighteenth working-class England has written how by the 1830s and 40s the working people were “virtually segregated in their stinking enclaves” – this was not just social segregation, but spatial segregation too, with the middle-classes getting as far out of the polluted industrial cities “as … Continue reading Poverty concealed, but just around the corner
I spotted a tweet by the New York Map Society the other day, featuring a map of saloons in the city from 1894, one of many examples to be found during this period in the world's most crowded cities. This was a period when temperance societies were fighting their hardest against the dual evils of … Continue reading Intemperance in New York: “Where Lager Reigns, 1883”
From the turn of the 19th century, social cartography was centred on mapping contagious disease - the most urgent problem of rapidly growing cities around the world. The examples which feature in my forthcoming book, Mapping Society range from Yellow Fever in New York, 1798, followed by a large number of maps of cholera, ranging across … Continue reading Mapping disease: typhoid in 1890s Wellington, New Zealand
