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For a lot of us, with the new year, comes an opportunity to take stock.

Consider what you have, what you want, what you may not need anymore, and maybe do a little

cleaning.

It's a moment where people are confronted with a question at the heart of this show.

How do we, as societies and as individuals, decide what to keep and what to throw away?

What defines trash varies from person to person.

It's an activity more than it is a category.

So it should be understood as a dynamic category rather than as the thing or a kind of thing.

My name is Susan Strasser.

I am the Richards Professor Amerita of American History at the University of Delaware,

which just really means that I'm retired from the University of Delaware.

And I'm the author of Never Done, A History of American Housework.

Second book was called Satisfaction Guaranteed, The Making of the American Mass Market, and and want a social history of trash.

If we were to see the way most people in the United States lived before 1890, it wouldn't

look familiar to us at all. By 1920, things would look old-fashioned to us, certainly, but they would look familiar.

And what that is about is the creation of the mass market, the creation of industrial products

that permeated domestic life.

And that really got fundamentally transformed

during those decades around the turn of the 20th century.

People related to material goods in very, very different ways.

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