A talk hosted by the Shifting Shorelines Global Working Group
The Roberta Buffett Institute's Shifting Shorelines Global Working Group welcomes Keith Pluymers for his talk “Water Infrastructure as Climate Infrastructure: Philadelphia’s Waterworks in the Anglo-Atlantic World”
In 1798, Benjamin Latrobe offered a plan to control Philadelphia’s temperature and alter its atmosphere while supplying the city with “a sufficiency of wholesome water for culinary purposes.” Latrobe’s proposal, which led to the creation of the city’s steam-powered water supply system beginning the next year, may seem to embody the imaginative excesses of eighteenth-century invention, but this talk argues we should take its atmospheric ambitions seriously. Doing so reveals the presence of atmospheric ambitions stretching across the eighteenth-century English Atlantic World.
Keith Pluymers is Associate Professor of History at Illinois State University. His first book, No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) argues that fears of wood scarcity, rather than acute shortages, shaped English expansion and the exploitation of forests in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is currently working on a history of Philadelphia’s urban water systems, disease, and climate thinking across the long eighteenth-century. This project has been supported with fellowships from the Library Company of Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, and Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University.
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Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs (847) 467-2770