Awards

• Commended for CHOICE 2021
• Commended for How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940 2021
• Winner of Mary Washington 2021
• Winner of VAF Lowell 2021

Overview

The transformation of average Americans' domestic lives, revealed through the mechanical innovations and physical improvements of their homes At the turn of the nineteenth century, the average American family still lived by kerosene light, ate in the kitchen, and used an outhouse. By 1940, electric lights, dining rooms, and bathrooms were the norm as the traditional working-class home was fast becoming modern-a fact largely missing from the story of domestic innovation and improvement in twentieth-century America, where such benefits seem to count primarily among the upper classes and the postWorld War II denizens of suburbia. Examining the physical evidence of America's working-class houses, Thomas C. Hubka revises our understanding of how widespread domestic improvement transformed the lives of Americans in the modern era. His work, focused on the broad central portion of the housing population, recalibrates longstanding ideas about the nature and development of the ""middle class"" and its new measure of improvement, ""standards of living."" In How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 19001940, Hubka analyzes a period when millions of average Americans saw accelerated improvement in their housing and domestic conditions. These improvements were intertwined with the acquisition of entirely new mechanical conveniences, new types of rooms and patterns of domestic life, and such innovations-from public utilities and kitchen appliances to remodeled and multi-unit housing-are at the center of the story Hubka tells. It is a narrative, amply illustrated and finely detailed, that traces changes in household hygiene, sociability, and privacy practices that launched large portions of the working classes into the middle class-and that, in Hubka's telling, reconfigures and enriches the standard account of the domestic transformation of the American home.

Full Product Details

9780816693016

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Reviews

In this groundbreaking study, Thomas C. Hubka examines the surprisingly ill-equipped houses of the broad middle class at the beginning of the twentieth century, charting the changes to the floor plan and the introduction of new technologies. Amply illustrated, Hubka's study redefines the middle class and reinterprets its housing, offering a new understanding of how most Americans became modern. --Alison K. Hoagland, author of Mine Towns: Buildings for Workers in Michigan's Copper Country This book is the most important study of common American houses to appear in the past half century. Thomas C. Hubka draws on a lifetime's investigation of working-class houses in the decades before World War II to show us how and why the single-family houses of the contemporary 'middle-majority' sprung from these modest dwellings. Hubka has established an agenda that should engross architectural historians for years. --Dell Upton, author of American Architecture: A Thematic History

Architects, historians, housing advocates, and other people interested in the houses most Americans live in should find much to like in How the Working Class Became Modern. --Daily Dose of Architecture In this groundbreaking study, Thomas C. Hubka examines the surprisingly ill-equipped houses of the broad middle class at the beginning of the twentieth century, charting the changes to the floor plan and the introduction of new technologies. Amply illustrated, Hubka's study redefines the middle class and reinterprets its housing, offering a new understanding of how most Americans became modern. --Alison K. Hoagland, author of Mine Towns: Buildings for Workers in Michigan's Copper Country This book is the most important study of common American houses to appear in the past half century. Thomas C. Hubka draws on a lifetime's investigation of working-class houses in the decades before World War II to show us how and why the single-family houses of the contemporary 'middle-majority' sprung from these modest dwellings. Hubka has established an agenda that should engross architectural historians for years. --Dell Upton, author of American Architecture: A Thematic History

Author Information

Thomas C. Hubka is professor emeritus of architecture at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee and author of Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England; Resplendent Synagogue: Architecture and Worship in an Eighteenth-Century Polish Community; and Houses without Names: Architectural Nomenclature and the Classification of America's Common Houses.

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