| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Joseph A. Amato. Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xii, 250. $22.50.

Dust and dirt are no longer the constant, highly visible companions of everyday life in developed countries. Films show dust storms in the desert, and tourists can smell and see the dirt and dust of Africa and India. But, as Joseph A. Amato shows, the lives of European peasants have been transformed and are no longer in constant touch with dust and dirt. At the same time, a whole new range of invisible matter, organic and inorganic, now inhabits our universe, and dust has ceased to constitute the smallest type of matter. 1

Amato's "history of the small and the invisible" spans the histories of culture, technology, and medicine. It is a work of synthesis. It takes standard accounts, for instance, of medieval and Renaissance craftsmanship, art, the measurement of time and space, and the discovery of the microscope and telescope to show how light, cleanliness, precision, and new visions of the minute began to elide the ages-long link between dust, dirt, and everyday life. Other histories enter into the story. Chemistry and industry supplied new surfaces such as plastics that were bright, smooth, and easily cleaned and upon which dust found it difficult to settle. Machines arrived on the scene that gave the mid-twentieth-century housewife the means, and the duty, of expelling dirt and dust. Earlier, "the great unwashed" had been cleaned and disinfected. Here, the histories of nineteenth-century public health crusades, whose origins lay in the enlightenment project of progress and were given a boost with the discovery of bacteria, come into play. . . .

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