Cementing America: the material that bound artificial stone and shaped everyday life in the United States

Abstract

Engineers and material scientists around the world are now developing alternatives to conventional cement and to concrete, the construction medium for which cement is crucial. Their research mostly aims to reduce cement production's significant global carbon footprint. In the face of these imminent transitions, history can account for how cement, a seemingly prosaic material, became so integral to modern life that it must be gradually replaced rather than simply abandoned. This historical study employs new theoretical approaches to reveal a non-living material's participation in cultural developments. It traces cement as a co-creator of specific practices and modes of thinking that emerged in the United States. To better understand the physical properties of conventional cement, the study first follows the transfer of English and European hydraulic cement technologies across the nineteenth century, from the Canal Age into the Concrete Age. It then takes as case studies three key modern technological artifacts of the US built environment: prisons, sidewalks, and home basements. For each artifact, the question is how cement's ability to separate and impede helped create not only shared cultures but also social distinctions. The research shows that in prisons, cement not only shielded prisoners from uncomfortable and unhealthy wind, precipitation, and disease but also shaped prison reformers' ideas of how a convict might be guided to penitence. In sidewalks, cement was such an effective barrier between feet and mud that it influenced new footwear styles and new laws of street use. In basements, cement made the domestic subterranean first a respectable space for middle-class white homemakers and then an icon of American suburban home life. Widely recognized as a moldable, durable, yet lifeless medium of cultural expression, the three artifact cases make clear that concrete was much more than this: it was a barrier material that fundamentally transformed physical, social, and political spaces. The engineers, architects, and policy experts currently reinventing cement can find in this history several key cultural and political criteria that innovative producers and consumers alike might use to decide which aspects of cement are worth preserving and which should change in the coming years.