Table of Contents

Foreword / Paul S. Sutter

Acknowledgments

Introduction | What’s That Smell?

1. The Smells of Sick Cities

2. Navigating by Nose: Common Sense and Responses to Urban Odors

3. Smells like Home: Odors in the Domestic Environment

4. The Stenches of Civil War

5. Smelling Committees and Authority over City Air

6. Learning to Smell Again: Managing the Air between the Civil War and Germ Theory

7. Visualizing Vapors and Seeing Smells

8. Dirty Cities, Smelly Bodies: City Odors after Germ Theory

Conclusion: If You Smell Something, Say Something

About the Author

Melanie A. Kiechle is assistant professor of history at Virginia Tech.

Reviews

"Smell Detectives is a brilliant, entertaining book informed by careful archival research. Supplemented by fascinating illustrations, the book navigates a rich and eclectic archive that is frequently obscured when historians overemphasize the perspectives of health experts and government officials. . . . Kiechle's remarkable study opens up productive new questions and lines of inquiry."
*Journal of Historical Geography*

"Kiechle’s addition to sensory history provides many points to discuss about the people who made the smells that they did not like."
*H-Net Reviews (H-Socialisms)*

"This book is a highly creative and unusual glimpse into a realm of environmental history that is rarely accessible to modern observers."
*New Books Network podcast*

"An attractive edition . . . beautifully written, with a flair for the attention-grabbing turn of phrase that is compulsory in sensory studies. The work is also finely illustrated, offering prints from the nineteenth century that are at no occasion superfluous. As environmental history, Smell Detectives is an essential read, offering new contexts for a field in search of freshly radical tones to combat environmental degradation."
*Journal of Social History*