| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800–1950. By Mark Tebeau. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xiv, 425 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8018-6791-6.)

Historical accounts of urban fire fighting generally fall into one of two genres: breezy, lavishly illustrated popular publications covering a century or more that emphasize individual heroics and catastrophic fires, and scholarly studies that place firemen from a particular time and place in their social, political, or gendered context in order to reveal transformations in urban culture. Fire fighters are perhaps America's most beloved public servants, and the gift shops in America's many firefighting museums (as well as the high prices fire-fighting memorabilia command on eBay) testify to the popular interest in the profession. At the same time, the good scholarly accounts of volunteer fire fighting, in particular, that have appeared over the last three or four decades have shaped the reigning paradigms of urban social, cultural, and gender history from working-class republicanism to male sporting culture. Fire fighting is both interesting and important, but unfortunately there has been little cross-fertilization between the world of the fire buff and that of the academic.

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