Founded in 1957, the Southern California suburb prophetically named City of Industry today represents, in the words of Victor Valle, ""The gritty crossroads of the global trade revolution that is transforming Southern California factories into warehouses, and adjacent working class communities into economic and environmental sacrifice zones choking on cheap goods and carcinogenic diesel exhaust."""City of Industry" is a stunning expose on the construction of corporate capitalist spaces.

Valle investigated an untapped archive of Industry's built landscape, media coverage, and public records, including sealed FBI reports, to uncover a cascading series of scandals. A kaleidoscopic view of the corruption that resulted when local land owners, media barons, and railroads converged to build the city, this suspenseful narrative explores how new governmental technologies and engineering feats propelled the rationality of privatization using their property-owning servants as tools.

Valle's tale of corporate greed begins with the city's founder James M. Stafford and ends with present day corporate heir, Edward Roski Jr., the nation's biggest industrial developeruco-owner of the L.A. Staples Arena and possible future owner of California's next NFL franchise. Not to be forgotten in Valle's captivating story are Latino working class communities living within Los Angeles's distribution corridors, who suffer wealth disparities and exposure to air pollution as a result of diesel-burning trucks, trains, and container ships that bring global trade to their very doorsteps. They are among the many victims of City of Industry.

Puerto Rico, Hawai'i, and California share the experiences of conquest and annexation to the United States in the nineteenth century and mass organizational struggles by rural workers in the twentieth. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW offers a comparative examination of those struggles, which were the era's longest and most protracted campaigns by agricultural workers, supported by organized labour, to establish a collective presence and realize the fruits of democracy. Dionicio Nodin Valdes examines critical links between the earlier conquests and the later organizing campaigns while he corrects a number of popular misconceptions about agriculture, farm-workers, and organized labour. He shows that agricultural workers have engaged in continuous efforts to gain a place in the institutional life of the nation, that unions succeeded before the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, and that the labour movement played a major role in those efforts. He also offers a window into understanding crucial limitations of institutional democracy in the United States, and demonstrates that the widespread lack of participation in the nation's institutions by agricultural workers has not been due to a lack of volition, but rather to employers' continuous efforts to prevent worker empowerment. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW demonstrates how employers benefitted not only from power and wealth, but also from imperialism in both its domestic and international manifestations. It also demonstrates how workers at times successfully overcame growers' advantages, although they were ultimately unable to sustain movements and gain a permanent institutional presence in Puerto Rico and California.

Reforming Urban Labor is a history of the nineteenth-century social reforms designed by middle-class progressives to domesticate the labor force. Industrial production required a concentrated labor force, but the swelling masses of workers in the capitals of Britain and Belgium, the industrial powerhouses of Europe, threatened urban order. At night, after factories had closed, workers and their families sheltered in the shadowy alleyways of Brussels and London. Reformers worked to alleviate the danger, dispersing the laborers and their families throughout the suburbs and the countryside. National governments subsidized rural housing construction and regulated workmen's trains to transport laborers nightly away from their urban work sites and to bring them back again in the mornings; municipalities built housing in the suburbs. On both sides of the Channel, respectable working families were removed from the rookeries and isolated from the marginally employed, planted out beyond the cities where they could live like, but not with, the middle classes.

In Janet L. Polasky's urban history, comparisons of the two capitals are interwoven in the context of industrial Europe as a whole. Reforming Urban Labor sets urban planning against the backdrop of idealized rural images, links transportation and housing reform, investigates the relationship of middle-class reformers with industrial workers and their families, and explores the cooperation as well as the competition between government and the private sector in the struggle to control the built environment and its labor force.

The charivari is a loud, late-night surprise house-visiting custom from members of a community, usually to a newlywed couple, accompanied by a qu?te (a request for a treat or money in exchange for the noisy performance) and/or pranks. Up to the first decades of the twentieth century, charivaris were for the most part enacted to express disapproval of the relationship that was their focus, such as those between individuals of different ages, races, or religions. While later charivaris maintained the same rituals, their meaning changed to a welcoming of the marriage.

Make the Night Hideous explores this mysterious transformation using four detailed case studies from different time periods and locations across English Canada, as well as first-person accounts of more recent charivari participants. Pauline Greenhill's unique and fascinating work explores the malleability of a tradition, its continuing value, and its contestation in a variety of discourses.

Enclosing Water is an environmental history of the Industrial Revolution, as inscribed on the Liri valley in Italy's Central Apennines. Amid forces of revolution and empire, and Enlightenment discourses of 'improvement' and political economy, the Liri's natural wealth - water-power - generated sweeping changes in its landscape and working and living environments. This book tells the story of how defining water as property - both materially and discursively - led to the emergence of an industrial riverscape, and of a concomitant new ecological consciousness; to heightened environmental risks and awareness of those risks. A dramatic century in the Liri's socio-environmental history, with its cast of new industrial bourgeoisie, engineers and civil servants, illuminates how material developments and ideological currents completely reshaped the relationship between society and nature at the periphery of 19th century Europe. By integrating Political Economy into the narrative of European environmental history, this pioneering book offers a critical new view of discourses of water disorder and environmental politics in the Mediterranean region.

Austin, Hillman, Morris, Standard and Wolseley were a handful of the myriad marques that once constituted Britain's indigenous motor industry. Born in 1896 into the high summer of Victorian prosperity, the native British industry survived until the collapse of The Rover Group in 2005. Jonathan Wood chronicles this industry's 109-year life, from its production of hand-made bespoke automobiles for the fortunate few to the arrival of mass production to provide cars for the many. He looks at the factories and the people who worked in them, and examines the role played by the component manufacturers that serviced the industry. Wood also offers explanations as to why motor manufacturing followed the British motorcycle, bicycle and cotton industries into oblivion.

"A damning new history . . .Jeffreys brings a rare combination of forensic acumen and narrative flair." --"Chicago Tribune"

At its peak in the 1930s, the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben was one of the most powerful corporations in the world. To this day, companies formerly part of the Farben cartel--the aspirin maker Bayer, the graphics supplier Agfa, the plastics giant BASF--continue to play key roles in the global market. IG Farben itself, however, is remembered mostly for its infamous connections to the Nazi Party and its complicity in the atrocities of the Holocaust. After the war, Farben's leaders were tried for crimes that included mass murder and exploitation of slave labor.

In "Hell's Cartel," Diarmuid Jeffreys presents the first comprehensive account of IG Farben's rise and fall, tracing the enterprise from its nineteenth-century origins, when the discovery of synthetic dyes gave rise to a vibrant new industry, through the upheavals of the Great War era, and on to the company's fateful role in World War II. Named one of the best books of the year by "Business Week," "Hell's Cartel" sheds new light on the codependence of industry and the Third Reich, and offers a timely warning against the dangerous merger of politics and the pursuit of profit.

"The Subterrranean Forest" studies the historical transition from the agrarian solar energy regime to the use of fossil energy, which has fuelled the industrial transformation of the last 200 years. The author argues that the analysis of historical energy systems provides an explanation for the basic patterns of different social formations. It is the availability of free energy that defines the framework within which socio-metabolic processes can take place. This thesis explains why the industrial revolution started in Britain, where coal was readily available and firewood already depleted or difficult to transport, whereas Germany, with its huge forests next to rivers, was much later. This landmark text was originally published in German in 1982 and was thoroughly revised and updated for the White Horse Press in 2001.

In the late 19th century, rails from Bethlehem Steel helped build the United States into the world's foremost economy. During the 1890s, Bethlehem became America's leading supplier of heavy armaments, and by 1914, it had pioneered new methods of structural steel manufacture that transformed urban skylines. Demand for its war materials during World War I provided the finance for Bethlehem to become the world's second-largest steel maker. As late as 1974, the company achieved record earnings of $342 million. But in the 1980s and 1990s, through wildly fluctuating times, losses outweighed gains, and Bethlehem struggled to downsize and reinvest in newer technologies. By 2001, in financial collapse, it reluctantly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Two years later, International Steel Group acquired the company for $1.5 billion. In Bethlehem Steel, Kenneth Warren presents an original and compelling history of a leading American company, examining the numerous factors contributing to the growth of this titan and those that eventually felled it-along with many of its competitors in the U.S. steel industry. Warren considers the investment failures, indecision and slowness to abandon or restructure outdated \u201cintegrated\u201d plants plaguing what had become an insular, inward-looking management group. Meanwhile competition increased from more economical \u201cmini mills\u201d at home and from new, technologically superior plants overseas, which drove world prices down, causing huge flows of imported steel into the United States. Bethlehem Steel provides a fascinating case study in the transformation of a major industry from one of American dominance to one where America struggled to survive.

Corporations often move factories to areas where production costs, notably labor, taxes, and regulations, are sharply lower than in the original company hometowns. Not every company, however, followed this trend. One of America's most iconic firms, the Campbell Soup Company, was one such exception: it found ways to achieve low-cost production while staying in its original location, Camden, New Jersey, until 1990.

The first in-depth history of the Campbell Soup Company and its workers, Condensed Capitalism is also a broader exploration of strategies that companies have used to keep costs down besides relocating to cheap labor havens: lean production, flexible labor sourcing, and uncompromising antiunionism. Daniel Sidorick's study of a classic firm that used these methods for over a century has, therefore, special relevance in current debates about capital mobility and the shifting powers of capital and labor. Sidorick focuses on the engine of the Campbell empire: the soup plants in Camden where millions of cans of food products rolled off the production line daily. It was here that management undertook massive efforts to drive down costs so that the marketing and distribution functions of the company could rely on a limitless supply of products to sell at rock-bottom prices. It was also here that thousands of soup makers struggled to gain some control over their working lives and livelihoods, countering company power with their own strong union local.

Campbell's low-cost strategies and the remarkable responses these elicited from its workers tell a story vital to understanding today's global economy. Condensed Capitalism reveals these strategies and their consequences through a narrative that shows the mark of great economic and social forces on the very human stories of the people who spent their lives filling those familiar red-and-white cans.

Trains have a nostalgic connotation for most Americans, but John Stilgoe argues that we should be looking to rail lines as the path to our future, not just our past. Train Time picks up where his acclaimed work Metropolitan Corridor left off, carrying Stilgoe's ideas about the spatial consequences of railways up to the present moment. With containers bringing the production of a global economy to our ports, the price of oil skyrocketing, and congestion and sprawl forcing many Americans to live far from work, trains offer an obvious alternative to a culture dependent on cars and long-haul trucking. Arguing that the train is returning, "an economic and cultural tsunami about to transform the United States," Stilgoe posits a future for railways as powerful shapers of American life.

For anyone looking for prescient analysis and compelling history of the American landscape and economy in general and railroad and transit history in particular, Train Time is an engaging look at the future of our railroads and of transportation and land development. For those familiar with John Stilgoe's talent for seeing things that elude the rest of us, and delivering those observations in pithy asides about real estate, corporate culture, and other aspects of American life, this book will not disappoint.

Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) was one of the great pioneers of electrical science. His ideas led to huge advances in communications and now form much of the bedrock of electrical engineering - every textbook and every college course bears his stamp. Despite having little formal education he created the mathematical tools that were to prove essential to the proper understanding and use of electricity. At first his ideas were thought to be outrageous and he had to battle long and hard against ignorance, prejudice and vested interests to get them accepted. Yet they are now so much a part of everyday electrical science that they are simply taken for granted and our great debt to him is rarely acknowledged. Caring nothing for social or mathematical conventions, he lived a fiercely independent life, much of the time close to poverty. His writings reveal a personality like no other and are laced with wickedly irreverent humour; he is by far the funniest author of scientific papers. Basil Mahon combines a compelling account of Heaviside's life with a powerful insight into his scientific thinking and the reasons for its enduring influence.

The culmination of a century-long dream to link the Great Lakes interior industrial hubs to the Atlantic Ocean, the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project stands as one of the largest and most important public works' initiatives of the twentieth century. Seen as vital to North American commerce and strategic in advancing America's position on the world stage, the billion dollar seaway and power dam were also a phenomenal feat of engineering involving an unprecedented level of cooperation between Canadian and American agencies and the unrelenting efforts of workers on both sides of the border. Dubbed the greatest construction show on earth, the largest waterway and hydro dam project ever jointly built by two nations consisted of seven locks, the widening of various canals, the taming of rapids, and the erection of the 3216-foot long, 195.5-foot high Robert Moses - Robert H. Saunders Power Dam. In this book, Claire Puccia Parham reveals the human side of the project in the words of its engineers, laborers, and carpenters. Drawing on firsthand accounts, she provides a vivid portrait of the lives of the men who built the seaway and the women who accompanied them. On the fiftieth anniversary of the dedication of the power dam and waterway, this book is a fitting tribute to the hard work and dedication of the project's 22,000 workers.

Heralded by Soviet propaganda as the "Path to the Future," the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway (BAM) represented the hopes and dreams of Brezhnev and the Communist Party elite of the late Soviet era. Begun in 1974, and spanning approximately 2,000 miles after twenty-nine years of halting construction, the BAM project was intended to showcase the national unity, determination, skill, technology, and industrial might that Soviet socialism claimed to embody. More pragmatically, the Soviet leadership envisioned the BAM railway as a trade route to the Pacific, where markets for Soviet timber and petroleum would open up, and as an engine for the development of Siberia.

Despite these aspirations and the massive commitment of economic resources on its behalf, BAM proved to be a boondoggle-a symbol of late communism's dysfunctionality-and a cruel joke to many ordinary Soviet citizens. In reality, BAM was woefully bereft of quality materials and construction, and victimized by poor planning and an inferior workforce. Today, the railway is fully complete, but remains a symbol of the profligate spending and inefficiency that characterized the Brezhnev years.

In "Brezhnev's Folly, " Christopher J. Ward provides a groundbreaking social history of the BAM railway project. He examines the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of workers from the diverse republics of the USSR and other socialist countries, and his extensive archival research and interviews with numerous project workers provide an inside look at the daily life of the BAM workforce. We see firsthand the disorganization, empty promises, dire living and working conditions, environmental damage, and acts of crime, segregation, and discrimination that constituted daily life during the project's construction. Thus, perhaps, we also see the final irony of BAM: that the most lasting legacy of this misguided effort to build Soviet socialism is to shed historical light on the profound ills afflicting a society in terminal decline.

In this corporate history of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Nannie M. Tilley recounts the story of Richard Joshua Reynolds and the vast R. J. Reynolds tobacco complex with precision and drama.
Reynolds's rise in the tobacco industry began in 1891 when he introduced saccharin as an ingredient in chewing tobacco. Forced into James B. Duke's American Tobacco Company in 1899, the Reynolds company became the agency for consolidating the flat plug industry. In 1907, as the government began its antitrust suit against Duke, Reynolds himself bucked the trust and introduced another bestseller: Prince Albert smoking tobacco. The government won its suit in 1911; Duke's Tobacco Combination was dissolved, and Reynolds, left with a free and independent company, a much larger plant, and improved machinery, immediately began an expansion program.
In 1913 Reynolds introduced Camels, a blend of Burley and flue-cured tobacco with some Turkish leaf. Perhaps the best-known cigarette ever produced, Camels swept the market and generally led the way until the development of filter-tipped cigarettes in the 1950s.
Other important Reynolds advances include the systematic purchase and storage of leaf tobacco, the development of a stemming machine, the adoption of cellophane for wrapping cigarettes, and the production of cigarette paper. For its employees, the company established a medical department, introduced lunch rooms and day nurseries, and installed group life insurance. Perhaps more important than any of these items was the development of reconstituted leaf, a method of combining scrap tobacco and stems into a fine elastic leaf entirely suitable for use in any tobacco product. This achievement represented a savings of 25 percent in the cost of leaf and was followed by the development of the filter-tipped Winstons and Salems.
"The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company" includes absorbing accounts of the company's steady technological progress, its labor problems and advances, and its influential role in North Carolina and in the industry through 1962.

In this innovative grassroots to global study, Kathleen Mapes explores how the sugar beet industry transformed the rural Midwest through the introduction of large factories, contract farming, and foreign migrant labor. Sweet Tyranny calls into question the traditional portrait of the rural Midwest as a classless and homogenous place untouched by industrialization and imperialism. Identifying rural areas as centers for modern American industrialism, Mapes contributes to the ongoing expansion of labor history from urban factory workers to rural migrant workers. She engages with a full range of people involved in this industry, including midwestern family farmers, industrialists, eastern European and Mexican immigrants, child laborers, rural reformers, Washington politicos, and colonial interests. Engagingly written, this book demonstrates that capitalism was not solely a force from above but was influenced by the people below who defended their interests in an ever-expanding market of imperialist capitalism. The fact that the United States acquired its own sugar producing empire at the very moment that its domestic sugar beet industry was coming into its own, as well as the fact that the domestic sugar beet industry came to depend on immigrant workers as the basis of its field labor force, magnified the local and global ties as well as the political battles that ensued. As such, the issue of how Americans would satiate their growing demand for sweetness--whether with beet sugar grown at home or with cane sugar raised in colonies abroad--became part of a much larger debate about the path of industrial agriculture, the shape of American imperialism, and the future of immigration.

From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, farmers in the Corn Belt transformed their region into a new, industrial powerhouse of large-scale production, mechanization, specialization, and efficiency. Many farm experts and implement manufacturers had urged farmers in this direction for decades, but it was the persistent labor shortage and cost-price squeeze following WWII that prompted farmers to pave the way to industrializing agriculture. Anderson examines the changes in Iowa, a representative state of the Corn Belt, in order to explore why farmers adopted particular technologies and how, over time, they integrated new tools and techniques. In addition to the impressive field machinery, grain storage facilities, and automated feeding systems were the less visible, but no less potent, chemical technologies-antibiotics and growth hormones administered to livestock, as well as insecticide, herbicide, and fertilizer applied to crops. Much of this new technology created unintended consequences: pesticides encouraged the proliferation of resistant strains of plants and insects while also polluting the environment and threatening wildlife, and the use of feed additives triggered concern about the health effects to consumers. In Industrializing the Corn Belt, J. L. Anderson explains that the cost of equipment and chemicals made unprecedented demands on farm capital, and in order to maximize production, farmers planted more acres with fewer but more profitable crops or specialized in raising large herds of a single livestock species. The industrialization of agriculture gave rural Americans a lifestyle resembling that of their urban and suburban counterparts. Yet the rural population continued to dwindle as farms required less human labor, and many small farmers, unable or unwilling to compete, chose to sell out. Based on farm records, cooperative extension reports, USDA publications, oral interviews, trade literature, and agricultural periodicals, Industrializing the Corn Belt offers a fresh look at an important period of revolutionary change in agriculture through the eyes of those who grew the crops, raised the livestock, implemented new technology, and ultimately made the decisions that transformed the nature of the family farm and the Midwestern landscape.

The Dreiser Committee, including writers Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson, investigated the desperate situation of striking Kentucky miners in November 1931. When the Communist-led National Miners Union competed against the more conservative United Mine Workers of America for greater union membership, class resentment turned to warfare. Harlan Miners Speak, originally published in 1932, is an invaluable record that illustrates the living and working conditions of the miners during the 1930s. This edition of Harlan Miners Speak, with a new introduction by noted historian John C. Hennen, offers readers an in-depth look at a pivotal crisis in the complex history of this controversial form of energy production.

This volume in the Perspectives in American Social History series reveals the long reach of the Industrial Revolution into the work lives and self-perceptions of average Americans. Industrial Revolution: People and Perspectives offers a well-informed look at the impact of new labor practices in the 1800s. It analyzes this pivotal moment in the broader context of the nation's economic development, measuring its consequences for Americans as both workers and consumers in all regions of the country. Industrial Revolution examines what industrialization meant for American artisans, women workers, slaves, and manufacturers. It shows how this new working world led to sharpening class divisions and expanded consumerism. Throughout, groundbreaking social historians draw on 19th-century primary documents and the latest research to show how the Industrial Revolution transformed the life the average American. Primary documents including Alexander Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures," poetry from the labor newspaper, The Voice of Industry, and William Gregg's "Practical Results of Southern Manufactures" A chronology highlighting key developments in the Industrial Revolution, including the invention of the cotton gin, the steamship, the telegraph, and the sewing machine

This is a firsthand account of a bomb factory's impact on small town life in South Carolina. First published in 1971, grade school teacher Louise Cassels' poignant memoir recounts the displacement of the residents of Ellenton, South Carolina, in the early 1950s to make way for the massive Savannah River Plant, a critical cold-war nuclear weapons facility. In late 1950, amid escalating cold-war tensions, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission announced plans to construct facilities to produce plutonium and tritium for use in hydrogen bombs. One such facility, the SRP, was built at a cost of $1.3 billion at a site that encompassed more than 315 square miles in South Carolina's Barnwell, Allendale, and Aiken counties. Some fifteen hundred families residing in small communities within the new plant's borders were forced to leave their homes. The largest of the affected towns was Ellenton, with a population of 760 residents. Detailing the period of evacuation and resettlement, ""The Unexpected Exodus"" recalls the dramatic personal consequences of the cold war on the South through the narrative of one uprooted family. Cassels touches on such enduring historical themes as southerners' sense of place and antipathy toward the federal government as she struggles to maintain equilibrium through life-changing circumstances. Throughout the text her extreme pride and patriotism are set against profound feelings of bitterness and loss. Frederickson's new introduction to this edition places Cassels' compelling tale against the historical backdrop of the cold war's impact on the South, a history often lost in the shadow of more widely read civil-rights narratives from the same era.

Ordinary working people, convinced their life could be better than it was, demanded not only a fair share in Mexico's progress but also to be respected for their contribution to that progress. Anderson integrates the story of these workers into the broader social experience of the Mexican Republic as it underwent the transition from a rural-agrarian society to an urban-industrial complex. This study demonstrates how the workers resisted the radical ideology of foreign revolutionary dogmas and based their demands on indigenous sociopolitical traditions.

Many studies have concluded that the effects of early industrialization on traditional craftsworkers were largely negative. Robert B. Kristofferson demonstrates, however, that in at least one area this was not the case. Craft Capitalism focuses on Hamilton, Ontario, demonstrating how the preservation of traditional work arrangements, craft mobility networks, and other aspects of craft culture ensured that craftworkers in that city enjoyed an essentially positive introduction to industrial capitalism.

Kristofferson argues that as former craftsworkers themselves, the majority of the city's industrial proprietors helped younger craftsworkers achieve independence. Conflict rooted in capitalist class experience, while present, was not yet dominant. Furthermore, he argues, while craftsworkers' experience of the change was more informed by the residual cultures of craft than by the emergent logic of capitalism, craft culture in Hamilton was not retrogressive. Rather, this situation served as a center of social creation in ways that built on the positive aspects of both systems.

Based on extensive archival research, this controversial and engaging study makes an important contribution to the study of industrialization and class formation in Canada.

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Longshoremen stand at the nexus of the global economy, handling nearly every cargo container that enters or leaves any country. Even in the face of cargo acontainerizationa in the 70s and 80s, a development that decimated longshore unions, they have managed to win contracts that provide health benefits and high wages.

On the Global Waterfront tells the story of how longshoremen in South Carolina confronted attempts to wipe out the stateas most powerful black organization. When a Danish shipping company began to shift their transportation to a nonunion firm in 1999, Local 1422 in Charleston, South Carolina, mobilized to protect their hard-won rights. What followed culminated in a protest in which 660 riot police were deployed against fifty dockworkers, a group that grew to 150 before the night was over. Four black and one white longshoreman -- subsequently known as the Charleston 5 -- were held for twenty months under house arrest on trumped-up felony charges of inciting a riot.

Within the politically conservative, racially charged, and intensely religious climate of the South, the unassuming local union president, Ken Riley -- supported behind the scenes by a militant AFL-CIO staffer -- crafted an international, grassroots campaign in defense of the arrested longshoremen. From Australia to Europe to Korea to the entire west coast of the United States, longshoremen threatened to shut down ports jeopardizing billions of dollars in trade per day. Their ultimate success vaulted Riley, and his reform-minded coworkers, to higher leadership in a notoriously corrupt union, and laid the foundation for successful rebuffs in ports around the world. On the GlobalWaterfront explores in detail a local conflict and in the process exposes the powers that rule the United States and the global economy. This compelling narrative of a local struggle, a transformed union leader, and a newly energized international worker movement highlights the resounding importance of the international labor movement that is not only still vital, but still capable of stopping global commerce on a dime.

Deindustrialization is not simply an economic process, but a social and cultural one as well. The rusting detritus of our industrial past the wrecked hulks of factories, abandoned machinery too large to remove, and now-useless infrastructures has for decades been a part of the North American landscape. In recent years, however, these modern ruins have become cultural attractions, drawing increasing numbers of adventurers, artists, and those curious about a forgotten heritage.

Through a unique blend of oral history, photographs, and interpretive essays, Corporate Wasteland investigates this fascinating terrain and the phenomenon of its loss and rediscovery. Steven High and David W. Lewis begin by exploring an emerging aesthetic they term the deindustrial sublime, explaining how the ritualized demolition of landmark industrial structures served as dramatic punctuations between changing eras. They then follow the narrative path blazed by urban spelunkers, explorers who infiltrate former industrial sites and then share accounts and images of their exploits in a vibrant online community. And to understand the ways in which geographic and emotional proximity affects how deindustrialization is remembered and represented, High and Lewis focus on Youngstown, Ohio, where residents and former steelworkers still live amid the reminders of more prosperous times.

Corporate Wasteland concludes with photo essays of sites in Michigan, Ontario, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania that pair haunting images with the poignant testimonies of those who remember industrial sites as workplaces rather than monuments. Forcing readers to look beyond nostalgia, High and Lewis reinterpret our deindustrialized landscape as a historical and imaginative challenge to the ways in which we comprehend and respond to the profound disruptions wrought by globalization."