Participant Info
- First Name
- Kendra
- Last Name
- Smith-Howard
- Country
- United States
- State
- NY New York
- ksmithhoward@albany.edu
- Affiliation
- University at Albany (SUNY)
- Website URL
- Keywords
- environmental history, consumer culture, history of agriculture, history of public health
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
My research focuses on environmental history in the twentieth-century United States, particularly in its intersection with histories of agriculture, consumer culture, technology and public health.
My current research, a book manuscript tentatively entitled “The Dirty Environmental History of Cleaning Up,” traces how the changing practices of cleaning up altered the ways in which Americans knew nature in the twentieth century, and tracks the environmental consequences of the pursuit of cleanliness in the US. It is under contract with University of Washington press, in the Weyerhaeuser environmental books series.
My first book, Pure and Modern Milk, calls attention to the ways in which new standards of purity and changing consumer practices reconfigured the work and material environment of the dairy farm in the twentieth century. I have received funding from the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center at the National Museum of American History, the Hagley Museum and Library, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
- Recent Publications
- “Absorbing Waste, Displacing Labor: Family, Environment, and the Disposable Diaper in the 1970s,” Environmental History 26 (April 2021): 207-230.
- Healing Animals in an Antibiotic Age: Veterinary Drugs and the Professionalism Crisis,” Technology and Culture (July 2017): 722-748.
- “Soldiers of the Soil: Agriculture and World War II,” in American Environments in the Second World War, edited by Nick Breyfogle, Tom Robertson, and Richard Tucker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
- Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- Country Focus
- Expertise by Geography
- United States
- Expertise by Chronology
- 20th century, 21st century
- Expertise by Topic
- Capitalism, Environment, Family, Food History, Rural & Agrarian History, World War I
