Parrotheads, Hemingway aficionados, and sun worshipers view Key West as a tropical paradise, and scores of writers have set tales of mystery and romance on the island. The city's real story-told by Maureen Ogle in this lively and engaging illustrated account-is as fabulous as fiction. In the two centuries since the city's pioneer founders battled Indians, pirates, and deadly disease, Key West has stood at the crossroads of American history. In 1861, Union troops seized control of strategically located Key West. In the early 1890s, Key West Cubans helped Jose Marti launch the Cuban revolution, and a few years later the battleship Maine steamed out of Key West harbor on its last, tragic voyage. At the turn of the century, a technological marvel-the overseas railroad-was built to connect mainland Florida to Key West, and in the 1920s and 1930s, painters, rumrunners, and writers (including Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost) discovered Key West. During World War II, the federal government and the military war machine permanently altered the island's landscape, and in the second half of the 20th century, bohemians, hippies, gays, and jet-setters began writing a new chapter in Key West's social history.

As any American who has traveled abroad knows, the American home contains more, and more elaborate, plumbing than any other in the world. Indeed, Americans are renowned for their obsession with cleanliness. Although plumbing has occupied a central position in American life since the mid-nineteenth century, little scholarly attention has been paid to its history. Now, in All the Modern Conveniences, Maureen Ogle presents a fascinating study that explores the development of household plumbing in nineteenth-century America.

Until 1840, indoor plumbing could be found only in mansions and first-class hotels. Then, in the decade before midcentury, Americans representing a wider range of economic circumstances began to install household plumbing with increasing eagerness. Ogle draws on a wide assortment of contemporary sources -- sanitation reports, builders' manuals, fixture catalogues, patent applications, and popular scientific tracts -- to show how the demand for plumbing was prompted more by an emerging middle-class culture of convenience, reform, and domestic life than by fears about poor hygiene and inadequate sanitation. She also examines advancements in water-supply and waste-management technology, the architectural considerations these amenities entailed, and the scientific approach to sanitation that began to emerge by century's end.

"As part of this well-researched study, Maureen Ogle links cities, politicians, systems, sanitarians, and ideas to produce a compelling account of household plumbing -- a taken-for-granted set of devices that allowed Americans to express their individualism and their commitment to 'science.'" -- Mark H. Rose, Florida Atlantic University