The Texture of Industry

The Texture of Industry

Author: Robert B. Gordon

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1997-02-06

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0195354826

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While historians have given ample attention to stories of entrepreneurship, invention, and labor conflict, they have told us little about actual work-places and how people worked. Workers seldom wrote about their daily employment. However, they did leave behind their tools, products, shops, and factories as well as the surrounding industrial landscapes and communities. In this book, Gordon and Malone look at the industrialization of North America from the perspective of the industrial archaeologist. Using material evidence from such varied sites as Indian steatite quarries, automobile plants, and coal mines, they examine manufacturing technology, transportation systems, and the effects of industrialization on the land. Their research greatly expands our understanding of industry and focuses attention on the contributions of anonymous artisans whose skills shaped our industrial heritage.


American Iron, 1607-1900

American Iron, 1607-1900

Author: Robert B. Gordon

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 1086

ISBN-13: 1421435020

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Winner of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for General Engineering from the Association of American Publishers Originally published in 1996. By applying their abundant natural resources to ironmaking early in the eighteenth century, Americans soon made themselves felt in world markets. After the Revolution, ironmakers supplied the materials necessary to the building of American industry, pushing the fuel efficiency and productivity of their furnaces far ahead of their European rivals. In American Iron, 1607-1900, Robert B. Gordon draws on recent archaeological findings as well as archival research to present an ambitious, comprehensive survey of iron technology in America from the colonial period to the industry's demise at about the turn of the twentieth century. Closely examining the techniques—the "hows"—of ironmaking in its various forms, Gordon offers new interpretations of labor, innovation, and product quality in ironmaking, along with references to the industry's environmental consequences. He establishes the high level of skills required to ensure efficient and safe operation of furnaces and to improve the quality of iron product. By mastering founding, fining, puddling, or bloom smelting, ironworkers gained a degree of control over their lives not easily attained by others.


Baltic Iron in the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century

Baltic Iron in the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century

Author: Chris Evans

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007-08-31

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9047421477

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The eighteenth century is often viewed as the heroic age of the British iron industry - a time of triumphant technological progress. In fact, it was an age of thwarted ambition, when the take-up of new technologies proved frustratingly slow. The eighteenth century was more accurately the age of Baltic iron. Swedish and Russian iron surged onto the British market, meeting the demand that British ironmasters could not satisfy. This was of epochal importance: Swedish iron allowed British steel makers and hardware manufacturers to dominate Atlantic markets. In turn, the rhythms of Atlantic commerce resounded through peasant communities in Sweden. Baltic iron in the Atlantic world captures this moment. In doing so it internationalises Swedish history in a radical way and presses an oceanic perspective on the traditionally insular view of the rise of heavy industry in Britain.


American Iron, 1607-1900

American Iron, 1607-1900

Author: Robert B. Gordon

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 9781421435008

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By mastering founding, fining, puddling, or bloom smelting, ironworkers gained a degree of control over their lives not easily attained by others.


History of Metals in Colonial America

History of Metals in Colonial America

Author: James A. Mulholland

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 1981-07-04

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0817300538

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In the struggle to create an indigenous industry, in the efforts to encourage and support the work of metals craftsmen, in the defiance of British attempts to regulate manufacturing of metals, the colonial society developed a metals technology that became the basis for future industrial growth.


Iron Artisans

Iron Artisans

Author: Ronald L. Lewis

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2023-04-04

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0822989689

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America’s emergence as a global industrial superpower was built on iron and steel, and despite their comparatively small numbers, no immigrant group played a more strategic role per capita in advancing basic industry than Welsh workers and managers. They immigrated in surges synchronized with the stage of America’s industrial development, concentrating in the coal and iron centers of Pennsylvania and Ohio. This book explores the formative influence of the Welsh on the American iron and steel industry and the transnational cultural spaces they created in mill communities in the tristate area—the greater upper Ohio Valley, eastern Ohio, northern West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania—including boroughs of Allegheny County, such as Homestead and Braddock. Focusing on the intersection of transnational immigration history, ethnic history, and labor history, Ronald Lewis analyzes continuity and change, and how Americanization worked within a small, relatively privileged, working-class ethnic group.


Volume II: The Eighteenth Century

Volume II: The Eighteenth Century

Author: P. J. Marshall

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 1998-05-28

Total Pages: 1063

ISBN-13: 0191647357

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Volume II of the Oxford History of the British Empire examines the history of British worldwide expansion from the Glorious Revolution of 1689 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a crucial phase in the creation of the modern British Empire. This is the age of General Wolfe, Clive of India, and Captain Cook. The international team of experts deploy the latest scholarly research to trace and analyse development and expansion over more than a century. They show how trade, warfare, and migration created an Empire, at first overwhelmingly in the Americas but later increasingly in Asia. Although the Empire was ruptured by the American Revolution, it survived and grew into the British Empire that was to dominate the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. series blurb The Oxford History of the British Empire is a major new assessment of the Empire in the light of recent scholarship and the progressive opening of historical records. It deals with the interaction of British and non-western societies from the Elizabethan era to the late twentieth century, aiming to provide a balanced treatment of the ruled as well as the rulers, and to take into account the significance of the Empire for the peoples of the British Isles. It explores economic and social trends as well as political.


Energy in American History

Energy in American History

Author: Jeffrey B. Webb

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-05-30

Total Pages: 1315

ISBN-13:

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Contextualizes and analyzes the key energy transitions in U.S. history and the central importance of energy production and consumption on the American environment and in American culture and politics. Focusing on the major energy transitions in U.S. history, from the pre-industrial era to the present day, this two-volume encyclopedia captures the major advancements, events, technologies, and people synonymous with the production and consumption of energy in the United States. Expert contributors show how, for example, the introduction of electricity and petroleum into ordinary American life facilitated periods of rapid social and political change, as well as profound and ongoing impacts on the environment. These developments have in many ways defined and accelerated the pace of modern life and led to vast improvements in living conditions for millions of people, just as they have also brought new fears of resource exhaustion and fossil-fuel induced climate change. Today, as America begins to move beyond the use of fossil fuels toward a greater reliance on renewables, including wind and solar energy, there is a pressing need to understand energy in America's past in order to better understand its energy future.