HOW THE WORKING CLASS HOME BECAME MODERN event at the Hardwick Town House with Thomas Hubka
October 21 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST
Thomas Hubka will join the Hardwick Historical Society at the Hardwick Town House on Monday, October 21 for a lecture and signing of his book How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940, at 7:00 p.m. EST.
This event is free and open to the public.
This book analyzes a period when millions of average Americans saw accelerated improvement in their housing and domestic conditions. It is a detailed narrative that traces changes in household hygiene, sociability, and privacy practices that launched large portions of the working classes into the middle class, reconfiguring and enriching the standard account of the domestic transformation of the American home.
“Hubka’s book becomes the new bible of this architecture for material culture studies, architectural historians, and sociologists. ” —CHOICE
“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
“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
