Clean Clothes and Fossil Fuels

Fossil fuels radically changed Americans’ laundry habits between the 1920s and the 1970s. Automatic washing machines, tumble dryers, and synthetic detergents made from petroleum enabled a single worker to produce clean, dry clothes within a few hours. Yet electric appliances required oil rigs and coal mines, and the new detergents produced foaming rivers and toxic algae blooms. Julia Guarneri discusses the environmental trade-offs involved in labour-saving laundry technologies and explores how manufacturers and utility companies pushed Americans towards ever-higher resource use.

Curating Toni Morrison’s Random House List

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Toni Morrison was a senior trade editor at Random House. During her time there she commissioned around fifty titles, many of which were landmark publications in their day such as fiction and memoir by African American women, the autobiographies of Angela Davis, Muhmmad Ali and Huey P. Newton, archival scrapbooks of African American history, literary anthologies of Black writing and more. Tessa Roynon describes her forthcoming project at the Library to curate a unique collection of these highly significant and beautiful books.

Julia Guarneri
Julia Guarneri is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Tessa Roynon
Tessa Roynon is an independent scholar and librarian, and a 2026 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow.