You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
An illustrated history of the cradle of American industrialization
This book is the first in-depth study of occupational health in nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain. As such it is an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on the history of health in the workplace. It focuses on the first four diseases to receive bureaucratic and legislative recognition: lead, arsenic and phosphorus poisoning and anthrax. As such it traces the emergence of medical knowledge and growth in public concern about the impact of these diseases in several major industries including pottery manufacture, matchmaking, wool-sorting and the multifarious trades in which arsenic was used as a raw material. It considers the process of state intervention taking due account of the influence of government inspectors, ‘moral entrepreneurs’ and various interest groups.
Hazards of the Job explores the roots of modern environmentalism in the early-twentieth-century United States. It was in the workplace of this era, argues Christopher Sellers, that our contemporary understanding of environmental health dangers first took shape. At the crossroads where medicine and science met business, labor, and the state, industrial hygiene became a crucible for molding midcentury notions of corporate interest and professional disinterest as well as environmental concepts of the 'normal' and the 'natural.' The evolution of industrial hygiene illuminates how powerfully battles over knowledge and objectivity could reverberate in American society: new ways of establishing cau...
Written throughout Stan Weir's decades as a blue-collar worker and labour educator, 'Singlejack Solidarity' offers a rare look at modern life and social relations as seen from the factory, dockside and the shop floor.
Autowork focuses on the character of automobile work in the modern factory and the relationships between autoworkers, their union, and management from 1913 to the present. Two-thirds of the essays are devoted to the post-World War II period, which historians have not examined as extensively as the early years of the automobile industry. In these original essays, the experiences of assembly-line workers come alive as never before. Using transcripts of government hearings, minutes of negotiations, records of arbitration proceedings, and articles in union newspapers, the authors present autoworkers' and union officials' descriptions of working conditions and the effect these conditions had on their health and home life. The essays analyze the dynamics of collective bargaining on important shop-floor issues such as safety, work pace, overtime, job assignments, and managerial discipline. Autowork demonstrates that many historians have underestimated the militancy and effectiveness of the United Automobile Workers of America.
Sons and Descendants represents the first comprehensive study of Babylonian family names. Drawing primarily on evidence from legal documents from the early Neo-Babylonian period (747-626 B.C.), the book examines the presence of large, named kin groups at the major Babylonia cities, considering their origins and the important roles their members played as local elites in city governance and temple administration. The period of Neo-Assyrian ascendance over Babylonia marks the first for which there is adequate textual material to allow for a study of these groups, but their continued presence and prominence in Babylonia under the native Neo-Babylonian dynasty and the Persian Empire means that this work is an important contribution to Assyriological understanding of Neo-Babylonian society.
In When the Air Became Important, medical historian Janet Greenlees examines the working environments of the heartlands of the British and American cotton textile industries from the nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Greenlees contends that the air quality within these pioneering workplaces was a key contributor to the health of the wider communities of which they were a part. Such enclosed environments, where large numbers of people labored in close quarters, were ideal settings for the rapid spread of diseases including tuberculosis, bronchitis and pneumonia. When workers left the factories for home, these diseases were transmitted throughout the local population, yet operatives ...
The “meticulously researched, elegantly argued and deeply humane” sequel to the landmark volume of social history, The Making of the English Working Class (The New York Times Book Review). This remarkable study investigates the gradual disappearance of a range of cultural customs against the backdrop of the great upheavals of the eighteenth century. As villagers were subjected to a legal system increasingly hostile to custom, they tried both to resist and to preserve tradition, becoming, as E. P. Thompson explains, “rebellious, but rebellious in defense of custom.” Although some historians have written of riotous peasants of England and Wales as if they were mainly a problem for magi...
Picking up where Rhode Island's Founders left off Dr. Patrick T. Conley, Rhode Island's preeminent historian and president of the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame, takes us through the Ocean State's history from 1790 to 1860. Learn how Samuel Slater, the Father of the Factory System, pioneered the making of modern Rhode Island, how Elizabeth Buffum Chace founded the Rhode Island Women's Suffrage Association and what political circumstances led Governor Thomas Wilson Dorr to the Dorr War in 1842. This newly revised and updated edition includes colorful biographical sketches of fifty-six influential Rhode Islanders who helped shape the state's urban and industrial development into the modern Rhode Island of today, including some lesser-known Rhode Islanders, including Eliza Jumel and Adin Ballou.