Professors Patricia Strach and Kathleen Sullivan are better known in political science circles as "The Garbage Girls." They have been researching the history and politics of trash collection for nearly a decade, which culminates in a most important book called The Politics of Trash. They join me to talk about why your waste matters.

Essential Reading:

Patricia Strach and Kathleen S. Sullivan, The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890–1929 (2022)

Recommended Reading:

Joel A. Tarr, Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (1996).

Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment (2004).

Stanley K. Schultz and Clay McShane, “To Engineer the Metropolis: Sewers, Sanitation, and City Planning in Late-Nineteenth America,” The Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (September 1978): 389-411

Carl A. Zimring, Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States (2016).

Kimberley S. Johnson, Reforming Jim Crow: Southern Politics and State in the Age before Brown (2010).

Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov, eds., Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal (2014).

Jessica Trounstine, Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities (2018).

Lily Baum Pollans, Resisting Garbage: The Politics of Waste Management in American Cities (2021).

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