Description: Janet Greenlees examines the working environments of the heartlands of the British and American cotton textile industries from the nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. She contends that the air quality within these pioneering workplaces was a key contributor to the health of the wider communities of which they were a part.
Review Quotes: "This is a promising, important, and long-awaited project--the first comparative history of industry-related hazards in the United States and Britain. The author has synthesized a vast body of research, much of it her own original work. At once comprehensive and selective, When the Air Became Important is illuminating scholarship."
--Chris Sellers "Stony Brook University"