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Essay on Sources
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Essay on Sources During graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I spent a lot of time on the fourth floor of the Engineering Library while working on my dissertation. My topic concerned the American steel industry, so I spent a lot of time reading hundred-year-old copies of the trade journal Iron Age. One day, coming up out of the elevator, I spotted a different trade journal and started thumbing through it. Its name was Ice and Refrigeration, and while glancing through it, I quickly learned that the United States had once had a gigantic natural ice industry. I also learned that refrigeration at the turn of the twentieth century was nothing like refrigeration today. This book is built from trade journals like that one. Ice and Refrigeration, founded in 1891, was the bible of the ice and refrigeration industries in America and the world during its early years. I have also read through many volumes of other industry journals: Ice and Cold Storage, Ice, Cold, Ice Trade Journal. Since the electrical industry dabbled in mechanical refrigeration too, I have read many articles in that industry’s trade journals as well. As most trade journal articles are unsigned and short, I have cited them with just the name of the journal, date, volume and page numbers. All articles credited with an author are cited with the author’s name and the title of the article. I first found many of the articles I cite (particularly the ones from electrical industry journals) in the Roy Eilers Collection at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., during a month-long fellowship there in 2000. Eilers was a St. Louis patent attorney who kept his own clipping service of technologies of all kinds. By a stroke of luck, the first set of clippings processed by the archivists there turned out to be on the refrigeration industry. Unfortunately, Eilers did not stamp volume numbers on the clips that he cut out, just journal, date, and page. In order to improve the accessibility of my sources to future researchers, I have found as many of those clips as I could in the original journal and cited them in full here. If I could not find the volume number, I have included a reference to the Eilers Collection in my citation. The second most important group of sources for this book were the catalogs and literature of ice and refrigeration companies. These are all published materials, but again often extremely rare. Most libraries, like the Library of Congress and the National Museum of American History, file these pamphlets as books and keep them in the stacks. Others, like the Hagley Museum and Library in Delaware, have some of this material in the stacks and some in archival collections. My rule has been that if I found the catalog in a collection, I have cited it as I would any other archival source. If I found it in the stacks of a library, I have cited it as I would a published source. As for published books, there is a notable absence of historical work on the American ice and refrigeration industries. As a result, I owe a great debt to four works that do consider this subject. Oscar Edward Anderson’s Refrigeration in America: A History of a New Technology and 228 Essay on Sources Its Impact (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953) is the last such work by an academic historian. It is really more of a traditional business history than a serious examination of the technology of ice or refrigeration. Nevertheless, it was still very helpful. Roger Thévenot’s History of Refrigeration throughout the World (trans. J. C. Fidler; Paris: International Institute of Refrigeration, 1979) and Barry Donaldson and Bernard Nagengast’s Heat & Cold: Mastering the Great Indoors (Atlanta: American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers, 1994) are both the work of engineers. All three of these books are out of print and exceedingly rare. The geographer Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2009) includes a single chapter on ice and refrigeration and then concentrates on how refrigeration affected the consumption of different types of food. It is almost exclusively consumer-oriented, but Freidberg’s argument that freshness is culturally dependent still had a great impact upon my thinking. Newspapers have been another important source for this book. In this instance, I have benefited greatly from the new technology of electronic databases...