| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Werner Troesken. Water, Race, and Disease. (NBER Series on Long-term Factors in Economic Development.) Cambridge: MIT Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 251. $35.00.
This book's title offers a succinct description of its contents. The water consists of that flowing through the water and sewer systems of America's cities; race involves the percentages of blacks and whites connected to these systems in the first four decades of the twentieth century; and disease signifies (in this case) the decline in water-borne illnesses after such connections were made.	1
Werner Troesken's thesis is that urban blacks, whose life expectancy at birth increased from thirty years in 1900 to forty-four years in 1940, benefited both absolutely and relative to whites from these public health efforts, despite (or perhaps because of) widespread discrimination. Before water and sewer systems were built, privies could and did frequently contaminate water drawn from wells. In cities that were not yet rigorously segregated, whites feared that their wells would be infected by the privies of blacks, and when privies were separated from wells by the construction of water and sewer systems, there was no feasible way to deny blacks these services. Nor, despite racist attitudes, was there much sentiment for such a denial—an acknowledgement that at least in the case of these public services, integration, not segregation, seemed the wisest course.	. . .

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