Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, November 1, 2004 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Susan Strasser

"Ragpickers, Bottle Caps, and Space Trash"

ABSTRACT -- Before industrial production and mass distribution, Americans reused everything possible. Scavenger pigs roamed city streets, swill children collected kitchen garbage, women darned socks, and itinerant peddlers traded manufactured goods for rags and bones. In the last hundred years, that way of life has been superseded by mass consumption, disposables, and waste on a previously unimaginable scale. Americans became hooked on convenience, fashion, and constant technological change, as mountains of garbage rose higher and higher. Space trash, Susan Strasser suggests, epitomizes the tendencies of our consumer culture and the dangers those tendencies pose.

SPEAKER -- Susan Strasser, Professor of History at the University of Delaware and Senior Resident Scholar at the Hagley Museum and Library's Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, has been praised by the New Yorker for retrieving what history discards: the taken-for-granted minutiae of everyday life. Her books include Never Done: A History of American Housework (1982), which won the Sierra Prize of the Western Association of Women Historians; Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (1989); and Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (1999), winner of the Abel Wolman Award from the Public Works Historical Society. She studied at Reed College and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and has taught at The Evergreen State College, Princeton University, George Washington University, and the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, the German Historical Institute, the Harvard Business School, the American Council of Learned Societies, Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution.