With England's Great Transformation, Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi's landmark The Great Transformation. The conventional wisdom has been that in the nineteenth century, England quickly moved toward a modern labor market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the contrary that labor contracts, centered on insidious master-servant laws, allowed employers and legal institutions to work in tandem to keep employees in line. Building his argument on three case studies--the Hanley pottery industry, Hull fisheries, and Redditch needlemakers--Steinberg employs both local and national analyses to emphasize the ways in which these master-servant laws allowed employers to use the criminal prosecutions of workers to maintain control of their labor force. Steinberg provides a fresh perspective on the dynamics of labor control and class power, integrating the complex pathways of Marxism, historical institutionalism, and feminism, and giving readers a subtle yet revelatory new understanding of workplace control and power during England's Industrial Revolution.

A World History of Rubber helps readers understand and gain new insights into the social and cultural contexts of global production and consumption, from the nineteenth century to today, through the fascinating story of one commodity. * Divides the coverage into themes of race, migration, and labor; gender on plantations and in factories; demand and everyday consumption; World Wars and nationalism; and resistance and independence * Highlights the interrelatedness of our world long before the age of globalization and the global social inequalities that persist today * Discusses key concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including imperialism, industrialization, racism, and inequality, through the lens of rubber * Provides an engaging and accessible narrative for all levels that is filled with archival research, illustrations, and maps

For indigenous communities throughout the globe, mining has been a historical forerunner of colonialism, introducing new, and often disruptive, settlement patterns and economic arrangements. Although indigenous communities may benefit from and adapt to the wage labour and training opportunities provided by new mining operations, they are also often left to navigate the complicated process of remediating the long-term ecological changes associated with industrial mining. In this regard, the mining often inscribes colonialism as a broad set of physical and ecological changes to indigenous lands. Mining and Communities in Northern Canada examines historical and contemporary social, economic, and environmental impacts of mining on Aboriginal communities in northern Canada. Combining oral history research with intensive archival study, this work juxtaposes the perspectives of government and industry with the perspectives of local communities. The oral history and ethnographic material provides an extremely significant record of local Aboriginal perspectives on histories of mining and development in their regions. With contributions by: Patricia Boulter Jean-SA (c)bastien Boutet Emilie Cameron Sarah Gordon Heather Green Jane Hammond Joella Hogan Arn Keeling Tyler Levitan Hereward Longley Scott Midgley Kevin O'Reilly Andrea Procter John Sandlos Alexandra Winton

Outstanding Title by Choice Magazine On the banks of the Pacific Northwest's greatest river lies the Hanford nuclear reservation, an industrial site that appears to be at odds with the surrounding vineyards and desert. The 586-square-mile compound on the Columbia River is known both for its origins as part of the Manhattan Project, which made the first atomic bombs, and for the monumental effort now under way to clean up forty-five years of waste from manufacturing plutonium for nuclear weapons. Hanford routinely makes the news, as scientists, litigants, administrators, and politicians argue over its past and its future. It is easy to think about Hanford as an expression of federal power, a place apart from humanity and nature, but that view distorts its history. Atomic Frontier Days looks through a wider lens, telling a complex story of production, community building, politics, and environmental sensibilities. In brilliantly structured parallel stories, the authors bridge the divisions that accompany Hanford's headlines and offer perspective on today's controversies. Influenced as much by regional culture, economics, and politics as by war, diplomacy, and environmentalism, Hanford and the Tri-Cities of Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick illuminate the history of the modern American West.

Synthesizing a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Conflict and Carnage in Yucatan offers a fresh study of Yucatan's complex and vio lent history that expands and revises perceptions of liberal as well as Second Empire politics in Yucatan from 1855 to 1876. The Yucatan peninsula has one of the longest, most multifaceted histories in the Americas. From the arrival of European explorers, native Mayan peoples with successful traditions and internecine conflicts grappled with outside forces attempting to graft a new template of life and politics on it by force. Conflict and Carnage in Yucatan provides a rigorously researched study of the vexed and bloody period of 1855 to 1876, during which successive national governments imposed, replaced, and restored liberal policies. Synthesizing extensive and heterogeneous sources, Douglas W. Rich mond covers three tumultuous political upheavals of this period: first, how Mexico's fledgling republic attempted to impose a liberal ideol ogy at odds with traditional Mayan culture on Yucatan; then, how the French-backed regime of Emperor Maximilian began to reform Yucatan; and finally how the republican forces of Benito Juarez restored the liberal hegemony. Many issues spurred resistance to the liberal governments. Imposition of free trade policies, the suppression of civil rights, and persecution of the Catholic Church mobilized white opposition to liberal governors. Mayans fought the seizure of their communal lands. A long-standing desire for regional autonomy united virtually all Yucatecans. Richmond analyzes these shifts precisely for scholars while remaining accessible to general readers fascinated by Mexico's complex history. He advances the thought-provoking argument that Yucatan both fared bet ter under the Maximilian's Second Empire than under the liberal republic and would have thrived more had the Second Empire not collapsed. The most violent and bloody manifestation of these broad conflicts was the long-running Caste War (Guerra de Castas), the most severe and sustained peasant revolt in Latin American history. Where other scholars have advocated the simplistic position that the war was a Mayan upris ing designed to re-establish a mythical past civilization, Richmond's sophisticated recounting of political developments from 1855 to 1876 restores nuance and complexity to this pivotal time in Yucatecan history. Conflict and Carnage in Yucatan is a welcome addition to scholarship about Yucatan and about state consolidation, empire, and regionalism.

Prepared to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the establishment of Nova Scotia's Supreme Court, this important new volume provides a comprehensive history of the institution, Canada's oldest common law court. The thirteen essays include an account of the first meeting in 1754 of the court in Michaelmas Term, surveys of jurisprudence (the court's early federalism cases; its use of American law; attitudes to the administrative state), and chapters on the courts of Westminster Hall, on which the Supreme Court was modelled, and the various courthouses it has occupied. Anchoring the volume are two longer chapters, one on the pre-confederation period and one on the modern period.

Editors Philip Girard, Jim Phillips, and Barry Cahill have put together the first complete history of any Canadian provincial superior court. All of the essays are original, and many offer new interpretations of familiar themes in Canadian legal history. They take the reader through the establishment of the one-judge court to the present day ? a unique contribution to our understanding of superior courts.

In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, America went from being a largely rural economy, with little internal transportation infrastructure, to a fledgling industrial powerhouse--setting the stage for the vast fortunes that would be made in the golden age of American capitalism. In The Dawn of Innovation, Charles R. Morris vividly brings to life a time when three stupendous American innovations--universal male suffrage, the shift of political power from elites to the middle classes, and a broad commitment to mechanized mass-production--gave rise to the world's first democratic, middle-class, mass-consumption society, a shining beacon to nations and peoples ever since. Behind that ideal were the machines, the men, and the trading and transportation networks that created a new, world-class economic power.

Eli Rubin takes an innovative approach to consumer culture to explore questions of political consensus and consent and the impact of ideology on everyday life in the former East Germany. Synthetic Socialism explores the history of East Germany through the production and use of a deceptively simple material: plastic. Rubin investigates the connections between the communist government, its Bauhaus-influenced designers, its retooled postwar chemical industry, and its general consumer population. He argues that East Germany was neither a totalitarian state nor a niche society but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens. To East Germans, Rubin says, plastic was a high-technology material, a symbol of socialism's scientific and economic superiority over capitalism. Most of all, the state and its designers argued, plastic goods were of a particularly special quality, not to be thrown away like products of the wasteful West. Rubin demonstrates that this argument was accepted by the mainstream of East German society, for whom the modern, socialist dimension of a plastics-based everyday life had a deep resonance.

This is the story of an industry that began in the North of England, with small engineering concerns building engines that powered early railways like the Stockton and Darlington and Liverpool & Manchester. Once railway companies had become firmly established, the industry expanded dramatically as they set up their own engineering workshops to build and maintain not only locomotives, but also carriages, wagons and all manner of other items of equipment.
Locations like Crewe, Derby, Doncaster, Eastleigh and Swindon soon became famous as 'Railway Towns' with new communities growing up alongside the extensive railway workshops, housing the thousands of men and their families. The scale of these operations was enormous, with works running as self-contained establishments, complete with their own foundries, machine shops, erecting shops, woodworking and carriage body shops. Supporting all this were huge office and design complexes, electric and hydraulic power stations and other associated activities.
Alongside the works operated by the mainline railways was a large and important private industry, with famous names like Beyer Peacock, North British, Robert Stephenson & Hawthorns and Vulcan Foundry building engines not only for domestic use, but exporting British railway locomotives and rolling stock all over the world.
At their height British workshops were turning out over 2000 locomotives a year, for railways at home and abroad, and after the Second World War more than 47,000 people were still employed in workshops run by the nationalised British Railways, with a further 13,000 still working for private firms. The dramatic changes to the railway industry since 1945, which have included the decline of steam and its replacement by diesel and electric power, the BR Modernisation Plan, and the eventual privatisation of British Rail have had a profound effect on the railway workshop industry. But the shadow of the workshops is a long one, and in many towns and many families they have left an indelible mark.

It sounds so simple. Just combine oxygen and hydrogen in an electrochemical reaction that produces water and electricity, and you'll have a clean, efficient power source. But scientists have spent decades-and billions of dollars in government and industry funding-developing the fuel cell. There have been successes and serendipitous discoveries along the way, but engineering a fuel cell that is both durable and affordable has proved extraordinarily difficult. Overpotential charts the twists and turns in the ongoing quest to create the perfect fuel cell. By exploring the gap between the theory and practice of fuel cell power, Matthew N. Eisler opens a window into broader issues in the history of science, technology, and society after the Second World War, including the sociology of laboratory life, the relationship between academe, industry, and government in developing advanced technologies, the role of technology in environmental and pollution politics, and the rise of utopian discourse in science and engineering.

In this extraordinary tale of union democracy, Dana L. Cloud engages union reformers at Boeing in Wichita and Seattle to reveal how ordinary workers attempted to take command of their futures by chipping away at the cozy partnership between union leadership and corporate management. Taking readers into the central dilemma of having to fight an institution while simultaneously using it as a bastion of basic self-defense, We Are the Union offers a sophisticated exploration of the structural opportunities and balance of forces at play in modern unions told through a highly relevant case study. Focusing on the 1995 strike at Boeing, Cloud renders a multi-layered account of the battles between company and the union and within the union led by Unionists for Democratic Change and two other dissident groups. She gives voice to the company's claims of the hardships of competitiveness and the entrenched union leaders' calls for concessions in the name of job security, alongside the democratic union reformers' fight for a rank-and-file upsurge against both the company and the union leaders. We Are the Union is grounded in on-site research and interviews and focuses on the efforts by Unionists for Democratic Change to reform unions from within. Incorporating theory and methods from the fields of organizational communication as well as labor studies, Cloud methodically uncovers and analyzes the goals, strategies, and dilemmas of the dissidents who, while wanting to uphold the ideas and ideals of the union, took up the gauntlet to make it more responsive to workers and less conciliatory toward management, especially in times of economic stress or crisis. Cloud calls for a revival of militant unionism as a response to union leaders' embracing of management and training programs that put workers in the same camp as management, arguing that reform groups should look to the emergence of powerful industrial unions in the United States for guidance on revolutionizing existing institutions and building new ones that truly accommodate workers' needs. Drawing from communication studies, labor history, and oral history and including a chapter co-written with Boeing worker Keith Thomas, We Are the Union contextualizes what happened at Boeing as an exemplar of agency that speaks both to the past and the future.

The Hawaiian pineapple industry emerged in the late nineteenth century as part of an attempt to diversify the Hawaiian economy from dependence on sugar cane as its only staple industry. Here, economic historian Richard Hawkins presents a definitive history of an industry from its modest beginnings to its emergence as a major contributor to the American industrial narrative. He traces the rise and fall of the corporate giants who dominated the global canning world for much of the twentieth century. Drawing from a host of familiar economic models and an unparalleled body of research, Hawkins analyses the entrepreneurial development and twentieth-century migration of the pineapple canning industry in Hawaii. The result is not only a comprehensive history, but also a unique story of American innovation and ingenuity amid the rising tides of globalization.

Still working hard in his seventies, Samuel Gompers gave no thought to retiring. But he faced a world of challenges in his final years as president of the American Federation of Labor. Ascendant Republicans were hostile. Conflicts over tactics and strategies divided the labour movement. And continuing unemployment kept the workforce in check. Despite all this, Gompers kept the faith, helping revitalize the AFL's nonpartisan political efforts, launching a campaign to organize women workers, and strengthening the Pan-American Federation of Labor. At the same time, he challenged government agencies like the Railroad Labor Board and continued his efforts to abolish child labor and fight labour injunctions. Although historians often assess these years as the most conservative and least productive period of Gompers's life, this final volume of the Samuel Gompers Papers demonstrates that even in this tumultuous time he continued his forward-looking leadership of the labor movement and retained his keen sense of judgment.

In The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age, Rosanne Currarino traces the struggle to define the nature of democratic life in an era of industrial strife. As Americans confronted the glaring disparity between democracy's promises of independence and prosperity and the grim realities of economic want and wage labor, they asked, "What should constitute full participation in American society? What standard of living should citizens expect and demand?" Currarino traces the diverse efforts to answer to these questions, from the fledgling trade union movement to contests over immigration, from economic theory to popular literature, from legal debates to social reform. The contradictory answers that emerged--one stressing economic participation in a consumer society, the other emphasizing property ownership and self-reliance--remain pressing today as contemporary scholars, journalists, and social critics grapple with the meaning of democracy in post-industrial America.

How did they do it? How did a profligate who killed a deputy sheriff before reforming, a mining engineer who went AWOL from the Austrian Navy, and three East Texas drillers join forces with other equally colorful characters to drill on Spindletop hill? Giant Under the Hill is a scholarly work firmly rooted in the narrative tradition, a great story intriguingly told by three Beaumont historians: Jo Ann Stiles, Ellen Rienstra, and Judith Linsley. Using material collected over decades, much of it never before published, they bring to life the efforts of Pattillo Higgins, Anthony Lucas, Al and Curt Hamill, and Peck Byrd to master the Spindletop salt dome that culminated in the discovery of the great Lucas gusher. Their find subsequently transformed not only the state of Texas but the entire oil industry. Giant Under the Hill is the definitive story of one of the most significant and colorful moments in Texas history.

The authors delved deeply into available records and found treasures at every turn. As news of their work spread, people came forward from all over the country with even more photographs and documents.

This exhaustively researched book focuses on the Lucas gusher in Beaumont in 1901, as well as the events leading up to it and the immediate aftermath. It's all here -- the challenge and frustration of the search, the excitement of the discovery, the euphoric chaos of the boom, and the genesis of the giant companies. After the gusher came in, life would never be the same.

This book presents a look at one of the first major railway disasters in Britain, the fall of the Dee bridge in May 1847, which occurred just outside Chester with the loss of five lives. The main line from Holyhead to Chester had only been opened six months before, and the chief engineer Robert Stephenson was slated nationally (almost being accused of manslaughter) as his cast-iron bridge had failed so catastrophically. Luckily, only a local train was passing and so few lives were lost. Full of detailed technical insight and illustrated with a wealth of contemporary material, this informative book will be of great use for engineering students and historians, as the Dee bridge is an often cited case study of bridge failure along with the Tay and Tacoma Narrows bridges. It will also appeal to interested locals, and railway enthusiasts.

Trained as a printer when still a boy, and thrilled throughout his life by the automation of printing and the headlong expansion of American publishing, Mark Twain wrote about the consequences of this revolution for culture and for personal identity. "Printer's Devil" is the first book to explore these themes in some of Mark Twain's best-known literary works, and in his most daring speculations - on American society, the modern condition, and the nature of the self. Playfully and anxiously, Mark Twain often thought about typeset words and published images as powerful forces - for political and moral change, personal riches and ruin, and epistemological turmoil. In his later years, Mark Twain wrote about the printing press as a center of metaphysical power, a force that could alter the fabric of reality. Studying these themes in Mark Twain's writings, Bruce Michelson also provides a fascinating overview of technological changes that transformed the American printing and publishing industries during Twain's lifetime, changes that opened new possibilities for content, for speed of production, for the size and diversity of a potential audience, and for international fame. The story of Mark Twain's life and art, amid this media revolution, is a story with powerful implications for our own time, as we ride another wave of radical change: for printed texts, authors, truth, and consciousness.

Written after the lumber industry shifted westward out of the necessity of supply, Rafting Days in Pennsylvania presents numerous recollections of the days when Pennsylvania's lumber traveled by mighty river raft, across the state and beyond. This elite but dangerous trade had all but disappeared by the time the volume was published in 1922, but the industry loomed large in the memories of Pennsylvanians and the idea of "the last raft" became almost legendary.

This collection, edited by J. Herbert Walker, not only preserves the recollections and commemorations of the lumber industry and the men who risked their lives in its name, but also echoes the regret over an industry that had become unsustainable due to the exhaustion of its main resource. As a whole, the volume reads as a treatise on reforestation and honors the living memory of Gifford Pinchot, a Pennsylvania governor and the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service.

Rafting Days in Pennsylvania provides glimpses into the memories of aging raftsmen. It details the process of raft building, the types of rafts used for various purposes, the rafting trade and lumber industry and their workers, forest lore, famous rivers, and notable floods. It also includes a glossary of rafting terms.

This history of three powerful family firms located in different European countries takes place over a period of more than two hundred years. The interplay and the changing social and legal arrangements of the families shaped the development of a European capitalism quite different from the Anglo-American variety.

Qualifying claims by Alfred Chandler and David Landes that family firms tend to be dysfunctional, Harold James shows how and why these steel and engineering firms were successful over long periods of time. Indeed, he sees the family enterprise as particularly conducive to managing risk during periods of upheaval and uncertainty when both states and markets are disturbed. He also identifies the key roles played by women executives during such times.

In "Family Capitalism," James tells how "iron masters" of a classical industrial cast were succeeded by new generations who wanted to shift to information-age systems technologies, and how families and firms wrestled with social and economic changes that occasionally tore them apart. Finally, the author shows how the trajectories of the firms were influenced by political, military, economic, and social events and how these firms illuminate a European model of "relationship capitalism."

Mergers have affected railroads in ways few other industries have experienced, and in the last 50 years they have steered the business direction of American railroads. Leaders Count brings readers the dramatic story of how the Aurora Branch Railroad, which spanned from Aurora, Illinois, to Chicago, grew and developed into the modern-day BNSF Railway. The story begins with the many ways railroads shaped and settled the country and tells how the founders' commitment to their dreams ensured the railroad's success. The profiles of tenacious leaders like James J. Hill, known as The Empire Builder, and Matthew Rose, current CEO of BNSF, will inspire readers. This is a case history of the business strategies that have taken this company from its humble beginnings to the industry giant that it is today. More than 75 photos from the company's extensive archives accompany the story of BNSF's evolution. As one of the largest and most successful of U.S. railroads, BNSF Railway is a vibrant example of today's freight railroad industry. the five principal companies making up the present day BNSF, its focus is on the critical decisions and strategies implemented by its leaders, choices that ensured the railroad's survival. Leaders Count will be released on the tenth anniversary of the merger that brought together the Burlington Northern and the Santa Fe railroads to create the industry titan that it is today.

Many Latino and Chinese women who immigrated to New York City over the past two decades found work in the garment industry-an industry well known for both hiring immigrants and its harsh working conditions. Today the garment industry is one of the largest immigrant employers in New York City and workers in Chinese- and Korean-owned factories produce 70 percent of all manufactured clothing in New York City. Based on extensive interviews with workers and employers, Margaret M. Chin, offers a detailed and complex portrait of the work lives of Chinese and Latino garment workers. Chin, whose mother and aunts worked in Chinatown's garment industry, also explores how immigration status, family circumstances, ethnic relations, and gender affect the garment industry workplace. In turn, she analyzes how these factors affect whom employers hire and what wages and benefits are given to the employees.

Chin's study contrasts the working conditions and hiring practices of Korean- and Chinese-owned factories. Her comparison of the two practices illuminates how ethnic ties both improve and hinder opportunities for immigrants. While both sectors take advantage of workers and are characterized by low wages and lax enforcement of safety regulations-there are crucial differences. In the Chinese sector, owners encourage employees, almost entirely female, to recruit new workers, especially friends and family. Though Chinese workers tend to be documented and unionized, this work arrangement allows owners to maintain a more paternalistic relationship with their employees. Gender also plays a major role in channeling women into the garment industry, as Chinese immigrants, particularly those with children, tend to maintain traditional gender roles in the workplace. Korean-owned shops, however, hire mostly undocumented Mexican and Ecuadorian workers, both male and female. These workers tend not to have children and are thus less tied to traditional gender roles. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, Korean employers hire workers on their own terms and would rather not allow current employees to influence their decisions.

Chin's work also provides an overview of the history of the garment industry, examines immigration strategies, and concludes with a discussion of changes in the industry in the aftermath of 9/11.

In his popular book The Germans (1982), Stanford historian Gordon Craig remarked: "When German intellectuals at the end of the eighteenth century talked of living in a Frederican age, they were sometimes referring not to the monarch in Sans Souci, but to his namesake, the Berlin bookseller Friedrich Nicolai." Such was the importance attributed to Nicolai's role in the intellectual life of his age by his own contemporaries.

While long neglected by students of the period, who tended to accept the caricature of him as a philistine who failed to recognize Goethe's genius, Nicolai has experienced a resurgence of interest among scholars reexploring the German Enlightenment and the literary marketplace of the eighteenth century.

This book, drawing upon Nicolai's large unpublished correspondence, rounds out the picture we have of Nicolai already as author and critic by focusing on his roles as bookseller and publisher and as an Aufkarer in the book trade.

The arrival of telegraphy and railroads changed power relations throughout the world in the nineteenth century. In the Mesilla region of the American Southwest, it contributed to two distinct and rapid shifts in political and economic power from the 1850s to the 1920s. Torsten Kathke illustrates how the changes these technologies wrought everywhere could be seen at a much accelerated pace here. A local Hispano elite was replaced first by a Hispano-Anglo one, and finally a nationally oriented Anglo elite. As various groups tried to gain, hold, and defend power, the region became bound ever closer to the US economy and to the federal government.

In 1893, Indianapolis carriage maker Charles Black created a rudimentary car - perhaps the first designed and built in America. Within 15 years, Indianapolis was a major automobile industry center rivaling Detroit, and known for quality manufacturing and innovation - the aluminum engine, disc brakes, aerodynamics, super chargers, and the rear view mirror were first developed there. When the Indianapolis Motor Speedway opened in 1909, the hometown manufacturers dominated the track - Marmon, Stutz and Duesenberg. The author covers their histories, along with less well known contributors to the industry, including National, American, Premier, Marion, Cole, Empire, Lafayette, Knight-Lyons and Hassler.

Starting in the late 1970s, tens of thousands of American industrial workers lost jobs in factories and mines. Deindustrialization had dramatic effects on those workers and their communities, but its longterm effects continue to ripple through working-class culture. Economic restructuring changed the experience of work, disrupted people's sense of self, reshaped local landscapes, and redefined community identities and expectations. Through it all, working-class writers have told stories that reflect the importance of memory and the struggle to imagine a different future. These stories make clear that the social costs of deindustrialization affect not only those who lost their jobs but also their children, their communities, and American culture. Through analysis of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, film, and drama, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization shows why people and communities cannot simply "get over" the losses of economic restructuring. The past provides inspiration and strength for working-class people, even as the contrast between past and present highlights what has been lost in the service economy. The memory of productive labor and stable, proud working-class communities shapes how people respond to contemporary economic, social, and political issues. These stories can help us understand the resentment, frustration, pride, and persistence of the American working class.