Table Matters: A Social and Cultural History of Restaurants

Restaurants have played an active role in many global issues: technology, ethnicity, race, gender and politics. Sample their history.

A Weeknights at the Wagner online lecture by Katie Rawson, Ph.D. and Elliott Shore, Ph.D.

In some parts of the world, including Philadelphia, restaurants are a relatively new phenomenon. Restaurants have played an active role in many global and current issues, including technology, ethnicity, race, gender and politics. Drs. Rawson and Shore share some of this history from their recently published book, Dining Out: A Global History of Restaurants. They highlight stories across time and place, including how chifa restaurants emerged from the migration of Chinese workers and their marriage to Peruvian businesswomen in nineteenth-century Peru; how Harvey Girls dispelled the ill repute of waiting tables, making rich lives for themselves across the American West; and other stories of how restaurants were engaged in the cultural, racial, political issues of their day. Rawson and Shorepresent an evening of delectable and probing history of the places where we have eaten.

About the Speakers:
Katie Rawson is director of learning innovation at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published on food in Faulkner, labor at Waffle House, collaboration in the academy, and data curation in the humanities. She has a Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University and was previously the managing editor of Southern Spaces and the English Librarian at Emory and the University of Pennsylvania.

Elliott Shore is professor emeritus of history at Bryn Mawr College and a lifelong Philadelphian. He has published books and articles in the history of advertising, the history of publishing, of radicalism, of German-America and of restaurants. He served as head of the Contemporary Culture Collection at Temple University’s library, head of the Historical Studies-Social Science Library at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Director of Libraries, CIO and Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College and the Executive Director of the Association of Research Libraries. He has his Ph.D. in History from Bryn Mawr College, an M.S. in Library Science from Drexel University and an M.A. in International History at the London School of Economics and his B.A. from Temple University.

Cover image: Horn & Hardart's Automat at 818-820 Chestnut St. ca. 1906. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Видео Table Matters: A Social and Cultural History of Restaurants канала Wagner Free Institute of Science