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Museum lovers know that energy and mystery run through every exhibition. Steven Lubar explains work behind the scenes—collecting, preserving, displaying, and using art and artifacts in teaching, research, and community-building—through historical and contemporary examples, especially the lost but reimagined Jenks Museum at Brown University.
Based on an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
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This innovative and absorbing book surveys a little known chapter in the story of American urbanism—the history of communities built and owned by single companies seeking to bring their workers’ homes and place of employment together on a single site. By 1930 more than two million people lived in such towns, dotted across an industrial frontier which stretched from Lowell, Massachusetts, through Torrance, California to Norris, Tennessee. Margaret Crawford focuses on the transformation of company town construction from the vernacular settlements of the late eighteenth century to the professional designs of architects and planners one hundred and fifty years later. Eschewing a static architectural approach which reads politics, history, and economics through the appearance of buildings, Crawford portrays the successive forms of company towns as the product of a dynamic process, shaped by industrial transformation, class struggle, and reformers’ efforts to control and direct these forces.
Ingenious Machinists recounts the early development of industrialization in New England and New York through the lives of two prominent innovators whose work advanced the transformation to factory work and corporations, the rise of the middle class, and other momentous changes in nineteenth-century America. Paul Moody chose a secure path as a corporate engineer in the Waltham-Lowell system that both rewarded and constrained his career. David Wilkinson was a risk-taking entrepreneur from Rhode Island who went bankrupt and relocated to Cohoes, New York, where he was instrumental in that city's early industrial development. Anthony J. Connors writes not just a history of technological innovation and business development, but also two interwoven stories about these inventors. He shows the textile industry not in its decline, but in its days of great social and economic promise. It is a story of the social consequences of new technology and the risks and rewards of the exhilarating, but unsettling, early years of industrial capitalism.
"While much has been written about the industrial revolution," writes Lawrence Peskin, "we rarely read about industrial revolutionaries." This absence, he explains, reflects the preoccupation of both classical and Marxist economics with impersonal forces rather than with individuals. In Manufacturing Revolution Peskin deviates from both dominant paradigms by closely examining the words and deeds of individual Americans who made things in their own shops, who met in small groups to promote industrialization, and who, on the local level, strove for economic independence. In speeches, petitions, books, newspaper articles, club meetings, and coffee–house conversations, they fervently discussed...
Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things is the first book-length collection of essays that explore the vibrant materiality of everyday objects in rhetorical theory, practice, and writing. It examines how things such as food, bicycles, and typewriters can influence history and sociality.
Concentrating on technology, economics, labor, and social history, Cradle to Grave documents the full life cycle of one of America's great mineral ranges from the 1840s to the 1960s. Lankton examines the workers' world underground, but is equally concerned with the mining communities on the surface. For the first fifty years of development, these mining communities remained remarkably harmonious, even while new, large companies obliterated traditional forms of organization and work within the industry. By 1890, however, the Lake Superior copper industry of upper Michigan started facing many challenges, including strong economic competition and a declining profit margin; growing worker dissatisfaction with both living and working conditions; and erosion of the companies' hegemony in a district they once controlled. Lankton traces technological changes within the mines and provides a thorough investigation of mine accidents and safety. He then focuses on social and labor history, dealing especially with the issue of how company paternalism exerted social control over the work force. A social history of technology, Cradle to Grave will appeal to labor, social and business historians.
What use is it to be given authority over men and lands if others do not know about it? Furthermore, what use is that authority if those who know about it do not respect it or recognise its jurisdiction? And what strategies and 'language' -written and spoken, visual and auditory, material, cultural and political - did those in authority throughout the medieval and early modern era use to project and make known their power? These questions have been crucial since regulations for governance entered society and are found at the core of this volume. In order to address these issues from an historical perspective, this collection of essays considers representations of authority made by a cross-se...
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