Majestic and lyrically written, The Conquest of Nature traces the rise of Germany through the development of water and landscape. David Blackbourn begins his morality tale in the mid-1700s, with the epic story of Frederick the Great, who attempted by importing the great scientific minds of the West and by harnessing the power of his army to transform the uninhabitable marshlands of his scattered kingdom into a modern state. Chronicling the great engineering projects that reshaped the mighty Rhine, the emergence of an ambitious German navy, and the development of hydroelectric power to fuel Germany's convulsive industrial growth before World War I, Blackbourn goes on to show how Nazi racial policies rested on German ideas of mastery of the natural world. Filled with striking reproductions of paintings, maps, and photographs, this grand work of modern history links culture, politics, and the environment in an exploration of the perils faced by nations that attempt to conquer nature."

The Victorian values of Liberalism and nonconformity permeated all aspects of society, not excluding industry and business. This insightful study follows 10 remarkable Victorian industrialists who came from relatively humble origins and rose through hard work, inventiveness, and application to become among the richest and most influential men of their generation. Each revolutionary showed an active and practical concern for his community and employees, providing them with housing, health care, education, recreation, and entertainment. For all their good deeds, these companies were also hugely profitable in the marketplace and include such household names as Cadburys, Colmans, Boots, and Unilever. This is the story of the rise of compassionate industry and the men who rode a wave of philanthropy to financial success.

Britain's supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal. This coal not only powered steam engines in factories, ships, and railway locomotives but also warmed homes and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain's cities and towns became filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke. In this far-reaching study, Peter Thorsheim explains that, for much of the nineteenth century, few people in Britain even considered coal smoke to be pollution. To them, pollution meant miasma: invisible gases generated by decomposing plant and animal matter. Far from viewing coal smoke as pollution, most people considered smoke to be a valuable disinfectant, for its carbon and sulfur were thought capable of rendering miasma harmless. Inventing Pollution examines the radically new understanding of pollution that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one that centered not on organic decay but on coal combustion. This change, as Peter Thorsheim argues, gave birth to the smoke-abatement movement and to new ways of thinking about the relationships among humanity, technology, and the environment.

One of the great food fads of the 1980s, fajitas, brought widespread acclaim to Tex-Mex restaurants, but this novelty was simply the traditional Mexican method of preparing beef. Hispanic carne asada, thin cuts of freshly slaughtered meat cooked briefly on a hot grill, differed dramatically from thick Anglo-American steaks and roasts, which were aged to tenderize the meat. When investors sought to import the Chicago model of centralized meatpacking and refrigerated railroad distribution, these cultural preferences for freshness inspired widespread opposition by Mexican butchers and consumers alike, culminating in a veritable sausage rebellion.

Through a detailed examination of meat provisioning, this book illuminates the process of industrialization in the final two decades of the Porfirio Daz dictatorship and the popular origins of the Revolution of 1910 in Mexico City. Archival sources from Mexico and the United States provide a unique perspective on high-level Porfirian negotiations with foreign investors. The book also examines revolutionary resistance, including strikes, industrial sabotage, and assassination attempts on the foreign managers. Unlike the meatpacking "Jungle" of Chicago, Mexican butchers succeeded in preserving their traditional craft.

This further volume in this series, looking at the changing patterns of rail freight from 1968 to the present day, examines the gradual shift from wagonload to trainload operation, the cull of public goods depots and small private sidings and the Speedlink years, together with details of wagon types and terminal facilities, and many charts, diagrams and plans.

Embracing individualism and antistatism, the United States traditionally has favored a limited role for government. Yet state intervention both against and on behalf of labor has a long history, culminating in the labor law reforms of the New Deal. How do we account for this irony? And how do we explain why, between World War I and the Great Depression, another leading industrial nation with similar ideological commitments, Great Britain, developed a different model? By comparing the United States and Britain, Larry G. Gerber makes clear that, in the development of industrial relations policies, ideology was secondary to economic realities-the structure of business, the market system, and the configuration of unions. Nonetheless, industrial policy developed within the broader context of the transition from the individualistic laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century to a collectivist political economy in which the state and organized groups played increasingly important roles while pluralist and corporatist models contended for influence. In Britain, where most business enterprises remained comparatively small, collective bargaining between workers and management became the norm. In the United States, however, large-scale corporations quickly rose to dominance. Eager to retain control of the production process, corporate elites resisted negotiating with workers and occasionally called upon the state to resolve labor crises. American workers, who initially opposed state involvement, eventually turned to the state for assistance as well. The New Deal administration responded with a series of new labor policies designed to balance the interests of employers and employees alike. Since state intervention did nothing to permanently change employers' hostility toward unions, the New Deal legislation was short-lived. Gerber's broad study of this momentous period in labor history helps explain the conundrum of a nation with a typically limited government whose intense intervention in labor relations caused long-lasting effects.

The Road to Dr Pepper, Texas is the story of Dublin Dr Pepper Bottling Co., a David-Goliath case study of the world's first Dr Pepper bottling plant and the only one that has always used pure cane sugar in spite of compelling reasons to switch sweeteners. The book traces the story from the founder's birth through the contemporary struggles of a tiny independent, family-owned franchise against industry giants. Owners of the plant have been touched by every major social, economic, and political issue of the past 114 years, and many of those forces threatened the survival of the plant. The Dublin plant's 100th birthday in 1991 was a turning point because the national media created an identity so unique that it has taken on a life of its own. Thanks to the Travel Channel, Food Network, Texas Monthly, Southern Living, and others, the Dublin plant and museum attract tens of thousands of tourists every year, and Dublin Dr Pepper is consumed around the world through Internet sales. ""The Road to Dr Pepper, Texas"" tells how a small plant ignored most of the cherished rules of production and marketing - and succeeded - in spite of not speeding up production, not expanding its franchise area, not cutting production costs, and not adapting to changing times.

Sugar cane has long been one of the world's most important cash crops, and the sugar cane industry can be regarded as one of the world's oldest industries. The industry involves three basic processes: the cultivation of cane, the milling of the cane to extract the juice and the rendering of the juice into crystal sugar. This book is a geography of the sugar cane industry from its origins to 1914. It describes the spread of the industry from India into the Mediterranean during medieval times, across to the Americas in the early years of European colonization, and its subsequent diffusion to most parts of the tropics. It examines changes in agricultural techniques over the centuries, the significance of improvements in milling and manufacturing techniques, and the role of the industry through its demand for labor in forming the multicultural societies of the tropical world. It is the first authoritative study of the development of the industry, in English, in forty years.

A celebrated triumph of historiography, "Rockdale" tells the story of the Industrial Revolution as it was experienced by the men, women, and children of the cotton-manufacturing town of Rockdale, Pennsylvania. The lives of workers, managers, inventors, owners, and entrepreneurs are brilliantly illuminated by Anthony F. C. Wallace, who also describes the complex technology that governed all of Rockdale's townspeople. Wallace examines the new relationships between employer and employee as work and workers moved out of the fields into the closed-in world of the spinning mule, the power loom, and the mill office. He brings to light the impassioned battle for the soul of the mill worker, a struggle between the exponents of the Enlightenment and Utopian Socialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ultimately triumphant champions of evangelical Christianity.

Henry Wells (1805-78) and William Fargo (1818-81) first worked together when they broke the Post Office monopoly on mail service along the Erie Canal in the 1840s. In 1852 they incorporated Wells, Fargo & Company and went into the express business in California, carrying gold, letters, packages, and freight between the mining regions and the financial centers of the East. They registered the miners to receive deliveries, guarded the gold-dust shipments, apprehended stage robbers, recovered stolen gold and silver, and established a reliable, conservative banking house in the world's wickedest city, San Francisco. They survived the collapse of the mining industry, the great California panic of 1855, the depredations of bandits such as Rattlesnake Dick and Black Bart, the dominance of the railroads, and the San Francisco earthquake and fire. Acclaimed Western writer Ralph Moody tells the exciting story of Henry Wells and his drivers, messengers, and riders; his accountants, managers, and detectives; and how they built a lasting empire in a business most entrepreneurs thought too risky to try. Moody, author of more than a dozen books on Western subjects, gives an action-packed account that readers young and old will enjoy.

'Fascinating' 'Books of the Year', Financial Times 'London's twelve great rail termini are the epic survivors of the Victorian age... Wolmar brings them to life with the knowledge of an expert and the panache of a connoisseur.' Simon Jenkins 'A wonderful tour, full of vivid incident and surprising detail.' Simon Bradley London hosts twelve major railway stations, more than any other city in the world. They range from the grand and palatial, such as King's Cross and Paddington, to the modest and lesser known, such as Fenchurch Street and Cannon Street. These monuments to the age of the train are the hub of London's transport system and their development, decline and recent renewal have determined the history of the capital in many ways. Built between 1836 and 1899 by competing private train companies seeking to outdo one another, the construction of these terminuses caused tremendous upheaval and had a widespread impact on their local surroundings. What were once called 'slums' were demolished, green spaces and cemeteries were concreted over, and vast marshalling yards, engine sheds and carriage depots sprung up in their place. In a compelling and dramatic narrative, Christian Wolmar traces the development of these magnificent cathedrals of steam, provides unique insights into their history, with many entertaining anecdotes, and celebrates the recent transformation of several of these stations into wonderful blends of the old and the new.

Charlotte-based NationsBank, formerly named NCNB, became one of the nation's leading financial powers following its acquisition in 1988 of First Republic Bank of Texas and its merger in 1991 with Atlanta-based C&S/Sovran. The authors provide a corporate history of this maverick financial institution.

Winner of the 2008 Holyer An Gof Award for non-fiction. An investigation of the popular tradition of 'Australia's Little Cornwall': how one town in South Australia gained and perpetuated this identity into the twenty-first century. This book is about Moonta and its special place in the Cornish transnational identity. Today Moonta is a small town on South Australia's northern Yorke Peninsula; along with the neighbouring townships of of Wallaroo and Kadina, it is an agricultural and heritage tourism centre. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Moonta was the focus of a major copper mining industry. This book is about Moonta and its special place in the Cornish transnational identity. Today Moonta is a small town on South Australia's northern Yorke Peninsula; along with the neighbouring townships of of Wallaroo and Kadina, it is an agricultural and heritage tourism centre. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Moonta was the focus of a major copper mining industry. From the beginning, Moonta cast itself as unique among Cornish immigrant communities, becoming 'the hub of the universe' according to its inhabitants, forging the myth of 'Australia's Little Cornwall': a myth perpetuated by Oswald Pryor and others that survived the collapse of the copper mines in 1923-and remains vibrant and intact today.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2018 'This is stupendous. The British nineteenth century, in all its complexity, all its horror, all its energy, all its hopes is laid bare. This is the definitive history, and will remain so for generations' A.N. Wilson To live in nineteenth-century Britain was to experience an astonishing series of changes, of a kind for which there was simply no precedent in the human experience. There were revolutions in transport, communication, work; cities grew vast; scientific ideas made the intellectual landscape unrecognizable. This was an exhilarating time, but also a horrifying one. In his dazzling new book David Cannadine has created a bold, fascinating new interpretation of the British nineteenth century in all its energy and dynamism, darkness and vice. This was a country which saw itself at the summit of the world. And yet it was a society also convulsed by doubt, fear and introspection. Victorious Century reframes a time at once strangely familiar and yet wholly unlike our own.

The coal mine represented much more than a way of making a living to the miners of Thurber, Texas, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--it represented a way of life. Coal mining dominated Thurber's work life, and miners dominated its social life. The large immigrant population that filled the mines in Thurber had arrived from more than a dozen nations, which lent a certain distinctiveness to this Texas town. In 1888 Robert D. Hunter and the Texas & Pacific Coal Company founded the town of Thurber on the site of Johnson Mines, a small coalmining village on the western edge of North Central Texas where Palo Pinto, Erath, and Eastland counties converged. William Whipple and Harvey E. Johnson first established a small community there in 1886 as the railroads' demand for coal enhanced the possibility of financial reward for entrepreneurs willing to risk the effort to tap the thin bituminous coal veins that lay beneath the ground. Where the first comers failed, Hunter and his stockholders prevailed. For almost forty years the company mined coal and owned and operated a town that by 1910 served as home to more than three thousand residents. In some respects, the town mirrored the work and culture of bituminous coal mining communities throughout the United States. Like most, it experienced labor upheaval that reached a dramatic climax in 1903 when the United Mine Workers, emboldened and strengthened by successes in other parts of the Southwest, organized Thurber's miners. Unlike elsewhere, however, the miners' success at Thurber was not fraught with violence and loss of life; furthermore, in the strike's aftermath good relations generally characterized employer/employeenegotiations. Marilyn Rhinehart examines the culture of the miners' work, the demographics and social life of the community, and the benefits and constraints of life in a company town. Above all she demonstrates the features both at work and after work of a culture shaped by the occupation of coal mining.

Using a series of case studies from five industries, Dicke analyzes franchising, a marketing system that combines large and small firms into a single administrative unit, strengthening both in the process. He studies the franchise industry from the 1840s to the 1980s, closely examining the rights and obligations of both the parent company and the franchise owner.
Originally published in 1992.
A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The Thurber coal district sprang to life in the late 1880s in northern Erath County, Texas, some seventy miles west of Fort Worth. The mines were opened by the Texas & Pacific Coal Company to fuel the locomotives of its railway, whose tracks crossed the state from Marshall to El Paso. The company also built the town of Thurber to service the mines. It then imported workers from distant points, eventually including some twenty nationalities, whose old country ways contrasted sharply with neighboring farm life. John Spratt grew to manhood in Mingus, just three miles north of Thurber during the 1920s. His chronicle of the Thurber district is not only a nostalgic trip back in time but also a case study of the impact of technological change on one part of modern America.

The Victorians risked more than just delays when boarding a steam train . . . Victorian inventors certainly didn't lack steam, but while they squabbled over who deserved the title of 'The Father of the Locomotive' and enjoyed their fame and fortune, safety on the rails was not their priority. Brakes were seen as a needless luxury and boilers had an inconvenient tendency to overheat and explode, and in turn, blow up anyone in reach. Often recognised as having revolutionised travel and industrial Britain, Victorian railways were perilous. Disease, accidents and disasters accounted for thousands of deaths and many more injuries. While history has focused on the triumph of engineers, the victims of the Victorian railways had names, lives and families and they deserve to be remembered . . .

The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas.
In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. "The Enlightenment and the Book" seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as "The Wealth of Nations" and "The Life of Samuel Johnson" were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits.
"The Enlightenment and the Book" explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.

The Great Depression of the 1930s nearly brought the agricultural community to a standstill. As markets went into an economic freefall, farmers who had suffered through a post–World War I economic depression in the 1920s would now struggle to produce crops, livestock, and other commodities that could return more than the cost to produce them. In Indiana, the county agents of the Purdue University Cooperative Extension Service saw this desperation firsthand. As they looked into the worried faces of the people they were asked to assist, the trust they had worked to build in their communities during the previous two decades would be put to the test. Throughout the painful years of the Great Depression, the county agents would stand side by side with Hoosier farmers, relying on science-based advice and proven strategies to help them produce more bushels per acre, more pigs per litter, more gallons of milk per cow, and more eggs per chicken. Then, as the decade drew to a close, the start of World War II in Europe soon placed farmers on the frontlines at home, producing the agricultural commodities needed in the United States and in war-torn locations abroad. The federal government quickly called on county agents to push farmers to meet historic production quotas—not an easy task with farm machinery, tires, and fuel rationed, and a severe labor shortage resulting from farm workers being drafted for military service or opting for higher-paying jobs in factories. Using the observations and reports of county agents, Planting the Seeds of Hope offers a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to live through these historic events in rural Indiana. The agents' own words and numerous accompanying photographs provide a one-of-a-kind perspective that brings their stories and those of the agricultural community they served to life at a pivotal time in American history.

Early in the twentieth century, for-profit companies such as Duke Power and South Carolina Electric and Gas brought electricity to populous cities and towns across South Carolina, while rural areas remained in the dark. It was not until the advent of publicly owned electric cooperatives in the 1930s that the South Carolina countryside was gradually introduced to the conveniences of life with electricity. Today, electric cooperatives serve more than a quarter of South Carolina's citizens and more than seventy percent of the state's land area, bringing not only power but also high-speed broadband to rural communities.The rise of "public" power-electricity serviced by member-owned cooperatives and sanctioned by federal and state legislation-is a complicated saga encompassing politics, law, finance, and rural economic development. Empowering Communities examines how the cooperatives helped bring fundamental and transformational change to the lives of rural people in South Carolina, from light to broadband. James E. Clyburn, the majority whip of the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina, provides a foreword.

This is the story of one of the most important strikes in labour history revealing the significance and truth of what actually happened. In July 1888, fourteen hundred women and girls employed by the matchmakers Bryant and May walked out of their East End factory and into the history books. Louise Raw gives us a challenging new interpretation of events proving that the women themselves, not celebrity socialists like Annie Besant, began it. She provides unequivocal evidence to show that the matchwomen greatly influenced the Dock Strike of 1889, which until now was thought to be the key event of new unionism, and repositions them as the mothers of the modern labour movement. Returning to the stories of the women themselves, and by interviewing their relatives today, Raw is able to construct a new history which challenges existing accounts of the strike itself and radically alters the accepted history of the labour movement in Britain.

Bricks are all around us, yet we seldom stop to look at them. There is an almost infinite range of bricks and, likewise, brick colours. Years ago every small district had its own brickworks to meet local demand, and larger businesses began to develop alongside better transport links that allowed them to supply regionally. Many of these local works left a record of their existence in the form of their name, pressed into the frog of the bricks they made - in some cases, the only sign that they ever existed. This book uses the named examples to look at the development and history of brickworks in Britain and the wide range of bricks that they made. From the single kiln in a field to the massive continuous kilns and chimneys that grew in areas where the right clays were available, millions of bricks were produced to feed the demands of housing, transport and industry. Specialist requirements for bricks to resist high temperatures were met by using fireclay and silica rock for refractory bricks. Today there are far fewer producers, but their output can be enormous and modern works continue to supply the demand for the humble brick.

The richly varied lives of the Martin brothers reflected the many upheavals of Britain in the age of Industrial Revolution. Low-born and largely unschooled, they were part of a new generation of artists, scientists and inventors who witnessed the creation of the modern world. William, the eldest, was a cussedly eccentric inventor who couldn't look at a piece of machinery without thinking about how to improve it; Richard, a courageous soldier, fought in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo; Jonathan, a hellfire preacher tormented by madness and touched with a visionary genius reminiscent of William Blake, almost burned down York Minster in 1829; while John, the youngest Martin, single-handedly invented, mastered and exhausted an entire genre of painting, the apocalyptic sublime, while playing host to the foremost writers, scientists and thinkers of his day. In The Prometheans Max Adams interweaves the fascinating story of these maverick siblings with a magisterial and multi-faceted account of the industrial, political and artistic ferment of early 19th-century Britain. His narrative centres on a generation of inventors, artists and radical intellectuals (including the chemist Humphry Davy, the engineer George Stephenson, the social reformer Robert Owen and the poet Shelley) who were seeking to liberate humanity from the tyranny of material discomfort and political oppression. For Adams, the shared inspiration that binds this generation together is the cult of Prometheus, the titan of ancient Greek mythology who stole fire from Zeus to give to mortal man, and who became a potent symbol of political and personal liberation from the mid-18th century onwards. Whether writing about Davy's invention of the miner's safety lamp, the scandalous private life of the Prince Regent, the death of Shelley or J.M.W. Turner's use of colour, Adams's narrative is pacy, characterful, and rich in anecdote, quotation and memorable character sketch. Like John Martin himself, he has created a sprawling and brightly coloured canvas on an epic scale.

Mining in Cornwall and Devon is an economic history of mines, mineral ownership, and mine management in the South West of England. The work brings together material from a variety of hard-to-find sources on the thousands of mines that operated in Cornwall and Devon from the late 1790s to the present day. It presents information on what they produced and when they produced it; who the owners and managers were and how many men, women and children were employed. For the mine owners, managers and engineers, it also offers a guide to their careers outside the South West, in other mining districts across Britain and the world. A long section on the Duchy of Cornwall provides details of the Duchy's role as the largest mineral owner in the South West, and of the modernisation and changing administration of the Stannaries. The printed book provides a guide to the sources, their interpretation and how they illustrate the long-term development and decline of the industry; the composite mine-by-mine tables are presented on an interactive CD included free with the book.