Session Organizer: Dr. Gerard J. Fitzgerald, Postdoctoral Fellow-Chemical Heritage Foundation
Chair and Commentator Dr. Christine Keiner, Assistant Professor Science, Technology, and Society/Public Policy Department, Rochester Institute of Technology

Papers

Philip C. Richardson, Jr., “Dixie by Gaslight: Modernity and Lighting Technology in the Old South”
Gerard J. Fitzgerald, “Void of either feeling or ambition”: Worker Fatigue and Technological Change in Southern Textile Mills, 1915-1940”
Gabriella M. Petrick “Savoring Southern Bounty: The TVA, Social Uplift, and the Development of Palatable Frozen Foods, 1930-1960”

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries emergent technologies entered the lives of southerners in myriad ways, which in time altered the dimension and range of their daily sensory experience. Whether it was in the workplace, on the streets, or in the home, the process of modernization and urbanization transformed the sensory environment of southerners complicating, enriching, and often times reordering prescribed consumer, labor, and leisure activities. Expanding urban centers, burgeoning mill towns, traditional farmers’ fields, and the university laboratories of the New South, all recast the process of industrialization and the nature of the human landscape traditionally defined by sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. Through three case studies (gaslight, mill design, and frozen food) this panel will examine the changing nature of sensory experience in everyday life throughout the south. Richardson’s paper explores the wholly neglected history of gaslight technology in the Old South by examining the development of two modern types of visual experience in antebellum southern cities: surveillance and spectacle. Fitzgerald’s paper examines the sensory experience of those laboring within the built environment of the southern mill and mill village. Attention to the work of engineers, physicians, and public health officials in quantifying worker fatigue will be analyzed through an environmental lens bounded by extreme levels of dust and humidity and high temperatures to understand the impact on worker’s bodies. Petrick’s paper investigates how an improved freezing process was used to lift southern farmers out of poverty through the efforts of the TVA. In this case researchers sought to produce tasting foods to consumers so that the Tennessee Valley could enter the industrial age. More generally, this panel looks back towards an earlier generation of historians of industrialization, including Leo Marx, David Noble and David Nye, who sought to bridge technology, culture and everyday life.