faulker080

Sorry for the slow pace of postings - no, I haven't been hitting the Madeira; I'm in the middle of a heavy semester teaching-wise, and on a short deadline for an article, etc. I'd be more than happy, as always, to post pieces by others, especially those of you whose semester is ending soon. Please let me know if you're interested. In the meantime, here's a bit on the latest post on Rachel Laudan's food history blog, "Trade, Trust and Madeira" , a post with both environmental and legal angles. Laudan connects the drinking of Madeira wine to Enlightenment theories of trade and sociability. Laudan writes: I just want to highlight how trade, trust and Madeira reinforced each other.  The wine became Madeira’s most important export around 1700.  By then, sugar, which had been the main export for over a hundred years, the forerunner of the sugar plantations of the New World, had exhausted the soils. For the next two hundred years, Madeira flourished. Producin...

Yesterday's This Day in Water History had the following (apparently originally from here ): Baltimore was one of the last major cities on the east coast to construct a proper sewer system. The City’s inability to install sanitary sewers until 1915 tarnished the appeal of what was otherwise a successful city. Several commissions throughout the nineteenth century formulated plans for a sewer system for Baltimore, but were unsuccessful because of economic conditions and fighting between political parties. Lacking a sewer system, Baltimore relied primarily on privy vaults (cesspools) for waste disposal until the early twentieth century. Privy vaults are holes dug 3 to 75 feet deep, though most were quite shallow. Baltimore’s sandy soil was ideal for privy vaults, making the method the most economically viable form of waste disposal. It was estimated that in 1880, with a population of 350,000, over 80 thousand privy vaults were in use in the City. The Great Fire of 1904 proved to be th...