Western Civilization II / Unit 9 WC2 0814 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Cellars, Soot, Slag, and a Miner Dead by Forty
Captions available
The idea
Families lived in one-room cellars and tenements without water or sanitation; soot darkened the moths; slag heaps and toxic runoff surrounded the mills; a miner, the anchor says, was dead by middle age, forty at the oldest. Epidemics followed.
In practice
Taller smokestacks moved the smoke, not the harm.
Where people slip
The conditions are the record; the life-expectancy figure is the anchor's.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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