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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Industrial history
How prisons became economic development strategies for rural Appalachian communities As the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region; there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky were its own country, it would have the seventh highest incarceration rate in the world. In Coal, Cages, Crisis, Judah Schept takes a closer look at this stunning phenomenon, providing insight into prison growth, jail expansion and rising incarceration rates in America's hinterlands. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research, Schept traces recent prison growth in the region to the rapid decline of its coal industry. He takes us inside this startling transformation occurring in the coalfields, where prisons are often built on top of old coalmines, including mountaintop removal sites, and built into community planning approaches to crises of unemployment, population loss, and declining revenues. By linking prison growth to other sites in this landscape-coal mines, coal waste, landfills, and incinerators-Schept shows that the prison boom has less to do with crime and punishment and much more with the overall extraction, depletion, and waste disposal processes that characterize dominant development strategies for the region. Schept argues that the future of this area now hangs in the balance, detailing recent efforts to oppose its carceral growth. Coal, Cages, Crisis offers invaluable insight into the complex dynamics of mass incarceration that continue to shape Appalachia and the broader United States.
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.
The Useful Knowledge of William Hutton shows the rapid rise of a self-taught workman and the growing prominence of the city of Birmingham during the two major events of the eighteenth-century - the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. Hutton achieved wealth, land, status, and literary fame, but later became a victim of violent riots. The book boldly claims that an understanding of the Industrial Revolution requires engagement with the figure of the 'rough diamond', a person of worth and character, but lacking in manners, education, and refinement. A cast of unpolished entrepreneurs is brought to life as they drive economic and social change, and improve their towns and themselves. The book also contends that the rise of Birmingham cannot be understood without accepting that its vibrant cultural life was a crucial factor that spurred economic growth. Readers are plunged into a hidden provincial world marked by literacy, bookshops, printing, authorship, and the spread of useful knowledge. We see that ordinary people read history and wrote poetry, whilst they grappled with the effects of industrial change. Newly discovered memoirs reveal social conflict and relationships in rare detail. They also address the problems of social mobility, income inequality, and breath-taking technological change that continue to perplex us today.
This book, first published in 2007, offers a bold new interpretation of American business history during the formative years 1870-1920, which mark the dawn of modern big business. It focuses on four major revolutions that ushered in this new era: those in power, transportation, communication, and organization. Using the metaphor of America as an economic hothouse uniquely suited to rapid economic growth during these years, it analyzes the interplay of key factors such as entrepreneurial talent, technology, land, natural resources, law, mass markets, and the rise of cities. It also delineates the process that laid the foundation for the modern era, in which virtually every human activity became a business, and, in most cases, a big business. The book also profiles numerous major entrepreneurs whose careers and activities illustrate broader trends and themes. It utilizes a wide variety of sources, including novels from the period, to produce a lively narrative.
Militant Minority tells the compelling story of British Columbia workers who sustained a left tradition during the bleakest days of the Cold War. Through their continuing activism on issues from the politics of timber licenses to global questions of war and peace, these workers bridged the transition from an Old to a New Left. In the late 1950s, half of B.C.'s workers belonged to unions, but the promise of postwar collective bargaining spawned disillusionment tied to inflation and automation. A new working class that was educated, white collar, and increasingly rebellious shifted the locus of activism from the Communist Party and Co-operative Commonwealth Federation to the newly formed New Democratic Party, which was elected in 1972. Grounded in archival research and oral history, Militant Minority provides a valuable case study of one of the most organized and independent working classes in North America, during a period of ideological tension and unprecedented material advance.
Located in the heart of England's Lake District, the placid waters of Thirlmere seem to be the embodiment of pastoral beauty. But under their calm surface lurks the legacy of a nineteenth-century conflict that pitted industrial progress against natural conservation - and helped launch the environmental movement as we know it. Purchased by the city of Manchester in the 1870s, Thirlmere was dammed and converted into a reservoir, its water piped one hundred miles south to the burgeoning industrial city and its workforce. This feat of civil engineering - and of natural resource diversion - inspired one of the first environmental struggles of modern times. "The Dawn of Green" re-creates the battle for Thirlmere and the clashes between conservationists who wished to preserve the lake and developers eager to supply the needs of a growing urban population. Bringing to vivid life the colorful and strong-minded characters who populated both sides of the debate, noted historian Harriet Ritvo revisits notions of the natural promulgated by romantic poets, recreationists, resource managers, and industrial developers to establish Thirlmere as the template for subsequent - and continuing - environmental struggles.
Because of its strong agrarian roots, the South has typically been viewed as a region not favorably disposed to innovation and technology. Yet innovation was never absent from industrialization in this part of the United States. From the early nineteenth century onward, southerners were as eager as other Americans to embrace technology as a path to modernity.This second volume in the series ""New Currents in the History of Southern Economy and Society"" features seven essays that range widely across the region and its history, from the antebellum era to the present, to assess the role of innovations presumed lacking by most historians. Offering a challenging interpretation of industrialization in the South, these writings show that the benefits of innovations had to be carefully weighed against the costs to both industry and society.The essays consider a wide range of innovative technologies. Some examine specific industries in subregions: steamboats in the lower Mississippi valley, textile manufacturing in Georgia and Arkansas, coal mining in Virginia, and sugar planting and processing in Louisiana. Others consider the role of technology in South Carolina textile mills around the turn of the twentieth century, the electrification of the Tennessee valley, and telemedicine in contemporary Arizona - marking the expansion of the region into the southwestern Sunbelt.Together, these articles show that southerners set significant limitations on what technological innovations they were willing to adopt, particularly in a milieu where slaveholding agriculture had shaped the allocation of resources. They also reveal how scarcity of capital and continued reliance on agriculture influenced that allocation into the twentieth century, relieved eventually by federal spending during the Depression and its aftermath that sparked the Sunbelt South's economic boom.""Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization"" clearly demonstrates that the South's embrace of technological innovation in the modern era doesn't mark a radical change from the past but rather signals that such pursuits wer always part of the region's economy. It deflates the myth of southern agrarianism while expanding the scope of antebellum American industrialization beyond the Northeast and offers new insights into the relationship of southern economic history to the region's society and politics.
In 1986 Lon Savage published Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920-21, a popular history now considered a classic. Among those the book influenced are Denise Giardina, author of Storming Heaven, and John Sayles, writer and director of Matewan. When Savage passed away, he left behind an incomplete book manuscript about a lesser-known Mother Jones crusade in Kanawha County, West Virginia. His daughter Ginny Savage Ayers drew on his notes and files, as well as her own original research, to complete Never Justice, Never Peace-the first book-length account of the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike of 1912-13. Savage and Ayers offer a narrative history of the strike that weaves together threads about organizer Mother Jones, the United Mine Workers union, politicians, coal companies, and Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency guards with the experiences of everyday men and women. The result is a compelling and in-depth treatment that brings to light an unjustly neglected-and notably violent-chapter of labor history. Introduced by historian Lou Martin, Never Justice, Never Peace provides an accessible glimpse into the lives and personalities of many participants in this critical struggle.
From telephones and transoceanic telegraphy to typewriters and phonographs, the era of Bell and Edison brought an array of wondrous new technologies for recording and communication. At the same time, print was becoming a mass medium, as works from newspapers to novels exploited new markets and innovations in publishing to address expanded readerships. Amid the accelerated movements of inventions and language, questions about media change became a transatlantic topic, connecting writers from Whitman to Kipling, Mark Twain to Bram Stoker and Marie Corelli. Media multiplicity seemed either to unite societies or bring division and conflict, to emphasize the material nature of communication or its transcendent side, to highlight distinctions between media or to let them be ignored. Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880-1900 analyzes this ferment as an urgent subject as authors sought to understand the places of printed writing in the late nineteenth century's emerging media cultures.
'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.
Newspapers do more than provide information. They enter into the process of forming communities, from voluntary associations to cities to nation-states. Widely acknowledged as one of our most insightful commentators on the history of American journalism, David Paul Nord offers a lively and wide-ranging discussion of journalism as a vital component of community. In settings ranging from the religion-infused towns of colonial America to the rapidly expanding urban metropolises of the late nineteenth century, Nord explores the cultural work of the press. Nord perceives the daily press as an arena in which a broad cross-section of the populace -- ethnically diverse, geographically diffuse, and economically stratified -- could participate in a common culture. During times of crisis, such as the yellow fever epidemic that gripped Philadelphia in 1793, newspapers sustained the bonds of community life. Amassing concrete historical evidence, Nord also examines how ordinary readers make sense of what they read and how they use journalism to form community attachments and engage in civic life. Illuminating how newspapers have intersected with religion, politics, reform, and urban life over nearly three centuries, Communities of Journalism is a deeply satisfying contribution to the cultural history of American journalism and to the history of reading.
In the early nineteenth century the major English chocolate firms,Fry, Rowntree, and Cadbury,were all Quaker family enterprises that aimed to do well by doing good. The English chocolatiers introduced the world's first chocolate bar and ever fancier chocolate temptations,while also writing ground-breaking papers on poverty, publishing authoritative studies of the Bible, and campaigning against human rights abuses. Chocolate was always a global business, and in the global competitors, especially the Swiss and the Americans Hershey and Mars, the Quaker capitalists met their match. The ensuing chocolate wars would culminate in a multi-billion-dollar showdown pitting Quaker tradition against the cutthroat tactics of a corporate behemoth. Featuring a cast of savvy entrepreneurs, brilliant eccentrics, and resourceful visionaries, Chocolate Wars is a delicious history of the fierce, 150-year business rivalry for one of the world's most coveted markets.
Around the 1830s, parts of Mexico began industrializing using water and wood. By the 1880s, this model faced a growing energy and ecological bottleneck. By the 1950s, fossil fuels powered most of Mexico's economy and society. Looking to the north and across the Atlantic, late nineteenth-century officials and elites concluded that fossil fuels would solve Mexico's energy problem and Mexican industry began introducing coal. But limited domestic deposits and high costs meant that coal never became king in Mexico. Oil instead became the favored fuel for manufacture, transport, and electricity generation. This shift, however, created a paradox of perennial scarcity amidst energy abundance: every new influx of fossil energy led to increased demand. German Vergara shows how the decision to power the country's economy with fossil fuels locked Mexico in a cycle of endless, fossil-fueled growth - with serious environmental and social consequences.
"Pre-eminent among historians of labor history." --Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr.
A groundbreaking moment in the discourse of the labour movement and a classic text which revolutionised social history. Bernstein uncovers a period when industrial trade unionism, working-class power and socialism became a rallying cry for millions of workers; from fields, mills, mines and factories. This is the second instalment of Bernstein's critically acclaimed trilogy on the American labour movement which charts how the New Deal and labour unions preserved democracy and capitalism at a time when the survival of both was unclear.
This business history analyzes the connections between private business, disarmament, and re-armament as they affected arms procurement and military technology transfers in Eastern Europe from 1919 to 1939. Rather than focusing on the negotiations or the political problems involved with the Disarmament Conferences, this study concerns itself with the business effects of the disarmament discussions. Accordingly, Schneider-Creusot, Skoda, Vickers, and their respective business activities in Eastern European markets serve as the chief subjects for this book, and the core primary sources relied upon include their unpublished corporate archival documents. Shifting the scope of analysis to consider the business dimension allows for a fresh appraisal of the linkages between the arms trade, disarmament, and re-armament. The business approach also explodes the myth of the 'merchants of death' from the inside. It concludes by tracing the armaments business between 1939 and 1941 as it transitioned from peacetime to war.
This biography of Andrew Carnegie emphasizes the economic dimension of his career in industry. It examines his life as a dynamic innovator during the period when the steel industry rapidly expanded and the United States became a major industrial power. Carnegie rose from a poverty-stricken Scottish childhood to a position of international industrial leadership, philanthropy, and peace advocacy, by means of intelligence, entrepreneurship, ambition, tenacity, guile, and ruthless determination. It is shown that Carnegie excelled as an economic actor. His alertness to expected profit opportunities, and success in coping with the uncertainties of the marketplace, made him a major influence on the growth of many of the most important industries of late-nineteenth century United States and world economies. His contribution to the better coordination of the actions of both demanders and suppliers in those industries by managerial, technological, and institutional innovations is emphasized. It is also argued that those profit-seeking actions and innovations occurred in the context of political policies and social institutions that produced a tremendous mal-investment of resources. This mal-investment was a result of protective tariffs, the stimulus and waste of war, and government subsidization of the railroad industry. Carnegie's role in this massive diversion of resources from other uses to those from which he personally benefitted is also emphasized. Lastly, Carnegie's actions in giving away the great personal fortune that he accumulated as he built his business empire are examined and their economic implications assessed.
Factories, with their ingenious machinery and miraculous productivity, are celebrated as modern wonders of the world. Yet from William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" they have also fuelled our fears of the future. Telling the story of the factory, Joshua B. Freeman takes readers from the textile mills in England that powered the Industrial Revolution to the steel and car plants of twentieth-century America, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, to today's behemoths making trainers, toys and iPhones in China and Vietnam. He traces arguments about factories and social progress through such critics and champions as Marx, Ford and Stalin. And he explores the representation of factories in the work of Margaret Bourke-White, Charlie Chaplin and Diego Rivera.
2020 Book of the Year * International Labor History Association Honorable Mention * Philip Taft Labor History Prize This rich history details the bitter, deep-rooted conflict between industrial behemoth International Harvester and the uniquely radical Farm Equipment Workers union. The Long Deep Grudge makes clear that class warfare has been, and remains, integral to the American experience, providing up-close-and-personal and long-view perspectives from both sides of the battle lines. International Harvester - and the McCormick family that largely controlled it - garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the 20th century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side the militant Farm Equipment Workers union, connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II. This evocative account, stretching back to the nineteenth century and carried through to the present, reads like a novel. Biographical sketches of McCormick family members, union officials and rank-and-file workers are woven into the narrative, along with anarchists, jazz musicians, Wall Street financiers, civil rights crusaders, and mob lawyers. It touches on pivotal moments and movements as wide-ranging as the Haymarket "riot," the Flint sit-down strikes, the Memorial Day Massacre, the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges, and America's late 20th-century industrial decline. Both Harvester and the FE are now gone, but this largely forgotten clash helps explain the crisis of yawning inequality now facing US workers, and provides alternative models from the past that can instruct and inspire those engaged in radical, working class struggles today.
A detailed study of Ipswich at a time of great growth and prosperity, highlighting the activities of its industries, merchants and craftsmen. Ipswich in the late Middle Ages was a flourishing town. A wide range of commodities passed through its port, to and from far-flung markets, bought and sold by merchants from diverse backgrounds, and carried in ships whose design evolved during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its trading partners, both domestic and overseas, changed in response to developments in the international, national and local economy, as did the occupations of its craftsmen,with textile, leather and metal industries were of particular importance. However, despite its importance, and the richness of its medieval archives, the story of Ipswich at the time has been sadly neglected. This is a gap whichthe author here aims to remedy. His careful study allows a detailed picture of urban life to emerge, shedding new light not only on the borough itself, but on towns more generally at a crucial point in their development, at a period of growing affluence when ordinary people enjoyed an unprecedented rise in standards of living, and the benefits of what might be termed our first consumer revolution. Nicholas Amor gained his doctorate from the University of East Anglia.
From best-selling railway expert, Julian Holland, explore Britain's historical railways in All Aboard. The history of Britain's railways is a long and fascinating one, filled with stories of grand endeavours, noted figures and record-breaking feats. Julian Holland brings together a unique miscellany of intriguing tales and engaging trivia - the perfect collection for every railway enthusiast. Stories range from Bulleid's 'Chinese Laundries', trainspotting trips in Wales and Scotland and Liverpool's 'Dockers' Umbrella' to railway artists and clergy, a railway-owned airline and railways that were never built. Find out about * The Royal Scot's 11,000-mile journey in the USA and Canada * A narrow gauge island railway in the middle of the Bristol Channel * How the London & South Western Railway saved the British Empire * Mallard's unbeaten world speed record of 1938 * How to fly by Great Western Railway from Cardiff to Plymouth * The 75-mile network of narrow gauge railways on the Isle of Skye * How another 4,500 miles of railway escaped closure by Dr Beeching All Aboard is a delightful miscellany for every railway enthusiast, filled with fascinating and obscure stories, facts and figures.
In the decades following the 1997 Asian economic crisis, South Korea sought segyehwa (globalization). Evidence of this is no more evident than in the country's capital, Seoul, where urban development has been central to making the city a global hub and not just the centre of the national economy. However, recent development projects differ from those of the past in that they no longer focus solely on economic efficiency, but on the deployment of a new urban aesthetics. As Jieheerah Yun reveals in Globalizing Seoul: The City's Cultural and Urban Change, the pursuit of globalization and the rebranding of Seoul's image from hard industrial city to soft cultural city have shaped the urban development of the city. Following a brief urban history of Seoul, she focuses on two key themes. In the first, how globalization has contributed to refashioning Korean traditions, she analyzes the policies and actions to preserve Korean folk houses and pre-industrial street layouts, looking in detail at the Bukchon and Insadong areas of the city. Her second theme is an examination of migration and the generation of new minority neighbourhoods amidst the segyehwa policies and the state's efforts to build a multicultural society. In detailed case studies of the redevelopment of Dongdaemun Market as part of rebranding Seoul as the 'world design capital' and of the Itaewon area as both a Special Tourist Zone and a Global Cultural Zone, she shows how multi-ethnic neighbourhoods are threatened by lack of consideration for economic justice and housing provision.
The history of an entrepreneurial family whose work influenced followers of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Gothic Revivalism, Art Needlework and Aestheticism LONGLISTED for the Arnold Bennett Society Book Prize 2020 This book is a richly illustrated history of the Wardle family of Leek, Staffordshire, which rose to prominence in fine textile production in the second half ofthe nineteenth century. At its core is an object-centred exploration revealing how an entrepreneurial family responded to complex international factors. Beautiful dyed, printed and embroidered textiles were created in Leek using traditional craft skills. Followers of the Arts and Crafts Movement and Gothic Revivalism, as well as Art Needlework and Aestheticism, benefited from the family enterprises that flourished despite rapid industrialisation. The Wardle family's rich legacy is played out against the backdrop of the Anglo-Indian silk trade. Thomas Wardle travelled in India and integrated Indian designs into British silk production. His work attracted William Morris, Walter Crane and A. L. Liberty, among others, and their designs, printed by Wardle, were internationally applauded. Elizabeth Wardle, embroiderer, worked with many major architects such as R. N. Shaw, G. G. Scott Jnr and J. D. Sedding.Lavishly illustrated, this book will be of interest to those interested in textile and fashion history and the history of the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as the relationship between the British Empire and the Indian subcontinent. BRENDA M. KING is a textile historian and holds the Chair of the Textile Society. She is also a freelance lecturer in the History of Design and Museum and Heritage Studies and the author of Silk and Empire (2005 and 2009) and Dye, Print, Stitch: Textiles by Thomas and Elizabeth Wardle (2009).
An ambitious and shocking expose of America's hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadow In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world's automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world's rubber. But only one percent of the world's rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation's explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic. Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America's rubber empire. Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America-on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war. A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present. |
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