Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century

"Easily the most thorough and best-grounded account of the coal-based system of heating in the nineteenth-century United States . . . authoritative." —The New England Quarterly
Home Fires tells the fascinating story of how changes in home heating over the nineteenth century spurred the growth of networks that helped remake American society. Sean Patrick Adams reconstructs the ways in which the "industrial hearth" appeared in American cities, the methods that entrepreneurs in home heating mar...