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Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America. By kathleen m. brown. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. 452 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
The introduction of filth to an apparently smooth surface can reveal previously unseen details and contours. Dirt does not always cover; it can also uncover. In her new book, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America, Kathleen Brown uses people's changing relationships with filth to help explain the trajectories of conquest and conflict in North America, as well as Early American gender, class, and race relations. Brown must be congratulated for offering historians the first sustained consideration of early American preoccupations with ideas and practices of cleanliness. That historians of early America have had to wait so long for such a monograph since the 1966 publication of the anthropologist Mary Douglas's paradigmatic Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo speaks to how difficult a task Brown has taken on. Foul Bodies opens up a range of important new questions about the functions of bodily pollution in the development of the Atlantic world. This is a big and important contribution.
Brown charts changing conceptions of cleanliness and the human body during the colonization of North America, the American Revolution, and the founding of the early Republic, through to the middle of the nineteenth century. She explains how early modern Europeans and early Americans used different cleanliness practices, and not necessarily different amounts of filth, as evidence to support their racial and socioeconomic hierarchies. Most strikingly, the cleansing and moral properties of water ebbed and flowed over...