Isobel Armstrong's startlingly original and beautifully illustrated book tells the stories that spring from the mass-production of glass in nineteenth-century England. Moving across technology, industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture, the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our understanding of the Victorian period.
The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time transforming the environment and the nineteenth-century imagination. It created a new glass culture hitherto inconceivable. Glass culture constituted Victorian modernity. It was made from infinite variations of the prefabricated glass panel, and the lens. The mirror and the window became its formative elements, both the texts and constituents of glass culture. The glassworlds of the century are heterogeneous. They manifest themselves in the technologies of the factory furnace, in the myths of Cinderella and her glass slipper circulated in print media, in the ideologies of the conservatory as building type, in the fantasia of the shopfront, in the production of chandeliers, in the Crystal Palace, and the lens-made images of the magic lantern and microscope. But they were nevertheless governed by two inescapable conditions.
First, to look through glass was to look through the residues of the breath of an unknown artisan, because glass was mass produced by incorporating glassblowing into the division of labour. Second, literally a new medium, glass brought the ambiguity of transparency and the problems of mediation into the everyday. It intervened between seer and seen, incorporating a modernphilosophical problem into bodily experience. Thus for poets and novelists glass took on material and ontological, political, and aesthetic meanings.
Reading glass forwards into Bauhaus modernism, Walter Benjamin overlooked an early phase of glass culture where the languages of glass are different. The book charts this phase in three parts. Factory archives, trade union records, and periodicals document the individual manufacturers and artisans who founded glass culture, the industrial tourists who described it, and the systematic politics of window-breaking. Part Two, culminating in glass under glass at the Crystal Palace, reads the glassing of the environment, including the mirror, the window, and controversy round the conservatory, and their inscription in poems and novels. Part Three explores the lens, from optical toys to 'philosophical' instruments as the telescope and microscope were known.
A meditation on its history and phenomenology, Victorian Glassworlds is a poetics of glass for nineteenth-century modernity.

Granite is the most unyielding of building materials. The great granite quarries of the North East are silent now, as are virtually all of the 100 granite yards that existed in Aberdeen around the year 1900. Yet in its time, the granite industry of north-east Scotland was the engine that built civilisations. As early as the sixteenth century, granite from Aberdeen and its vicinities was building castles. In the heyday of the mid-nineteenth century, the granite men of the North East hewed this material from the bowels of the earth and used it to fashion the iconic structures that defined the age. It paved the streets and embankments of London. It was used to build bridges over the Thames. It was carved into monuments for kings and commoners not only in Britain but all over the world. None of it possible without the men that toiled in those quarries and yards. This is the story of those granite men and their industry.

The phrase "a strong work ethic" conjures images of hard-driving employees working diligently for long hours. But where did this ideal come from, and how has it been buffeted by changes in work itself? While seemingly rooted in America's Puritan heritage, perceptions of work ethic have actually undergone multiple transformations over the centuries. And few eras saw a more radical shift in labor ideology than the American industrial age.
Daniel T. Rodgers masterfully explores the ways in which the eclipse of small-scale workshops by mechanized production and mass consumption triggered far-reaching shifts in perceptions of labor, leisure, and personal success. He also shows how the new work culture permeated society, including literature, politics, the emerging feminist movement, and the labor movement.
A staple of courses in the history of American labor and industrial society, Rodgers's sharp analysis is sure to find a new audience, as twenty-first-century workers face another shift brought about by technology. "The Work Ethic in Industrial America 1850-1920 "is a classic with critical relevance in today's volatile economic times.

At the start of the Ford Motor Company in 1903, the Dodge Brothers supplied nearly every car part needed by the up-and-coming auto giant. After fifteen years of operating a successful automotive supplier company, much to Ford's advantage, John and Horace Dodge again changed the face of the automotive market in 1914 by introducing their own car. The Dodge Brothers automobile carried on their names even after their untimely deaths in 1920, with the company then remaining in the hands of their widows until its sale in 1925 to New York bankers and subsequent purchase in 1928 by Walter Chrysler. The Dodge nameplate has endured, but despite their achievements and their critical role in the early success of Henry Ford, John and Horace Dodge are usually overlooked in histories of the early automotive industry. Charles K. Hyde's book The Dodge Brothers: The Men, the Motor Cars, and the Legacy is the first scholarly study of the Dodge brothers and their company, chronicling their lives - from their childhood in Niles, Michigan, to their long years of learning the machinist's trade in Battle Creek, Port Huron, Detroit, and Windsor, Ontario - and examining their influence on automotive manufacturing and marketing trends in the early part of the twentieth century. Hyde details the brothers' civic contributions to Detroit, their hiring of minorities and women, and their often anonymous charitable contributions to local organizations. Hyde puts the Dodge brothers' lives and accomplishments in perspective by indicating their long-term influence, which has continued long after their deaths. The most complete and accurate resource on John and Horace Dodge available, The Dodge Brothers uses sources that have never before been examined. Its scholarly approach and personal tone make this book appealing for automotive historians as well as car enthusiasts and those interested in Detroit's early development.

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.

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.

The image of western ranchers making a stand for their "rights"-against developers, the government, "illegal" immigrants-may be commonplace today, but the political power of the cowboy was a long time in the making. In a book steeped in the culture, traditions, and history of western range ranching, Michelle K. Berry takes readers into the Cold War world of cattle ranchers in the American West to show how that power, with its implications for the lands and resources of the mountain states, was built, shaped, and shored up between 1945 and 1965. After long days working the ranch, battling human and nonhuman threats, and wrestling with nature, ranchers got down to business of another sort, which Berry calls "cow talk." Discussing the best new machinery; sharing stories of drought, blizzards, and bugs; talking money and management and strategy: these ranchers were building a community specific to their time, place, and work and creating a language that embodied their culture. Cow Talk explores how this language and its iconography evolved and how it came to provide both a context and a vehicle for political power. Using ranchers' personal papers, publications, and cattle growers association records, the book provides an inside view of how range cattle ranchers in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana created a culture and a shared identity that would frame and inform their relationship with their environment and with society at large in an increasingly challenging, modernizing world. A multifaceted analysis of postwar ranch life, labor, and culture, this innovative work offers unprecedented insight into the cohesive political and cultural power of western ranchers in our day.

Securing Urban Heritage considers the impact of securitization on access to urban heritage sites. Demonstrating that symbolic spaces such as these have increasingly become the location of choice for the practice and performance of contemporary politics in the last decade, the book shows how this has led to the securitization of urban public space. Highlighting specific changes that have been made, such as the installation of closed-circuit television or the limitation of access to certain streets, plazas and buildings, the book analyses the impact of different approaches to securitization. Claiming that access to heritage sites is a precursor to an informed and thorough understanding of heritage, the editors and contributors to this volume argue that new forms of securing urban heritage, including community involvement and digitalization, offer possibilities for the protection and use of urban heritage. Looking more closely at the versatile relationship between access and securitization in this context, the book provides a theoretical framework for the relationship between urban heritage and securitization. Comparing case studies from cities in Angola, Bulgaria, Eritrea, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Suriname, Sweden, Turkey, UK, and the US, the book reveals some of the key mechanisms that are used to regulate access to heritage sites around the world. Providing much-needed insight into the diverse challenges of securitization for access and urban heritage, Securing Urban Heritage should be essential reading for academics, students, and practitioners from the fields of heritage and urban studies, architecture, art history, conservation, urban planning, and urban geography.

Heritage and Sustainable Urban Transformations introduces the concept of 'deep cities', a novel approach to the understanding and management of sustainable historic cities that will advance knowledge about how the long-term, temporal and transformative character of urban heritage can be better integrated into urban policies for sustainable futures. Contrary to the growing emphasis on green or smart cities, which focus only on the present and future, the concept of 'deep cities' offers an approach that combines an in-depth understanding of the past with the present and future. Bringing together chapters that cover theoretical, methodological and management issues related to 'deep cities', the volume argues that using this approach will force researchers, managers and consultants to actively use the heritage and history of a city in the planning and management of sustainable cities. Exploring different definitions of 'deep cities', the book reveals varying and sometimes conflicting views among stakeholders concerning how, where and when the depth of a city should be conceptualized. Despite this, the book demonstrates how this new approach can help to create robust cities for the future, as new and innovative solutions are combined with the preservation and strengthening of historical features. Heritage and Sustainable Urban Transformations is the first international collection on the subject of sustainable historic cities. As such, the book will be of great interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, heritage management, architecture, heritage conservation, anthropology, development studies, geography, planning and archaeology.

In this wide-ranging study, Ghassan Moazzin sheds critical new light on the history of foreign banks in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China, a time that saw a substantial influx of foreign financial institutions into China and a rapid increase of both China's foreign trade and its interactions with international capital markets. Drawing on a broad range of German, English, Japanese and Chinese primary sources, including business records, government documents and personal papers, Moazzin reconstructs how during this period foreign banks facilitated China's financial integration into the first global economy and provided the financial infrastructure required for modern economic globalization in China. Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China shows the key role international finance and foreign banks and capital markets played at important turning points in modern Chinese history.

Churchill's American Arsenal reveals how the technology, know-how, and production power behind the victorious Allied partnership during World War II extended beyond the battlefront and onto the home-front. Many weapons and inventions were credited with winning World War II, most famously in the assertion that the atomic bomb "ended the war, but radar won the war." What is less well known is that both airborne radar and the atomic bomb were invented in British laboratories, but built by Americans. The same holds true for many other American weapons credited with the Allied victory: the P-51 Mustang fighter, the Liberty ship, the proximity fuze, the Sherman tank, and even penicillin all began with British scientists and planners, but were designed and mass-produced by American engineers and factory workers. Churchill's American Arsenal chronicles this vital but often fraught relationship between British inventiveness and American technical might. At first, leaders in each nation were deeply skeptical that such a relationship could ever be successful. But despite initial misunderstandings, petty jealousies, and continuing differences over priorities, scientists and engineers on both sides of the Atlantic found new and often ingenious ways to work together, jointly creating the weapons that often became the decisive factor in the strategy for victory that Churchill had laid out during the earliest days of the conflict. While no single invention won the war, without any one of them, the war could have been lost.

The 'Industrial Revolution' was a pivotal point in British history that occurred between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries and led to far reaching transformations of society. With the advent of revolutionary manufacturing technology productivity boomed. Machines were used to spin and weave cloth, steam engines were used to provide reliable power, and industry was fed by the construction of the first railways, a great network of arteries feeding the factories. Cities grew as people shifted from agriculture to industry and commerce. Hand in hand with the growth of cities came rising levels of pollution and disease. Many people lost their jobs to the new machinery, whilst working conditions in the factories were grim and pay was low. As the middle classes prospered, social unrest ran through the working classes, and the exploitation of workers led to the growth of trade unions and protest movements. In this Very Short Introduction, Robert C. Allen analyzes the key features of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and the spread of industrialization to other countries. He considers the factors that combined to enable industrialization at this time, including Britain's position as a global commercial empire, and discusses the changes in technology and business organization, and their impact on different social classes and groups. Introducing the 'winners' and the 'losers' of the Industrial Revolution, he looks at how the changes were reflected in evolving government policies, and what contribution these made to the economic transformation. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Jan Breman takes dispossession as his central theme in this ambitious analysis of labour bondage in India's changing political economy from 1962 to 2017. When, in a remote past, tribal and low-caste communities were attached to landowning households, their lack of freedom was framed as subsistence-oriented dependency. Breman argues that with colonial rule came the intrusion of capitalism into India's agrarian economy, leading to a decline in the idea of patronage in the relationship between bonded labour and landowner. Instead, servitude was reshaped as indebtedness. As labour became transformed into a commodity, peasant workers were increasingly pushed out of agriculture and the village but remained adrift in the wider economy. This footloose workforce is subjected to exploitation when their labour power is required and is left in a state of exclusion when it is surplus to demand. The outcome is progressive inequality that is thoroughly capitalist in nature.

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 British Industrial Revolution has long been seen as the spark for modern, global industrialization and sustained economic growth. Indeed the origins of economic history, as a discipline, lie in 19th-century European and North American attempts to understand the foundation of this process. In this book, William J. Ashworth questions some of the orthodoxies concerning the history of the industrial revolution and offers a deep and detailed reassessment of the subject that focuses on the State and its role in the development of key British manufactures. In particular, he explores the role of State regulation and protectionism in nurturing Britain's negligible early manufacturing base. Taking a long view, from the mid 17th century through to the 19th century, the analysis weaves together a vast range of factors to provide one of the fullest analyses of the industrial revolution, and one that places it firmly within a global context, showing that the Industrial Revolution was merely a short moment within a much larger and longer global trajectory. This book is an important intervention in the debates surrounding modern industrial history will be essential reading for anyone interested in global and comparative economic history and the history of globalization.

Many of us may not realize that what we now call snail mail was once just as revolutionary as e-mail and text messages are today. As David M. Henkin argues in "The Postal Age," a burgeoning postal network initiated major cultural shifts during the nineteenth century, laying the foundation for the interconnectedness that now defines our ever-evolving world of telecommunications.
This fascinating history traces these shifts from their beginnings in the mid-1800s, when cheaper postage, mass literacy, and migration combined to make the long-established postal service a more integral and viable part of everyday life. Through original correspondence and public discussions from the time period, Henkin tells the story of how Americans adjusted to a new world of long-distance correspondence, crowded post offices, junk mail, valentines, and dead letters. Throughout, "The Postal Age" paints a vibrant picture of a society where possibilities proliferated for personal and impersonal communications.
""The Postal Age" is engagingly written, rich with anecdotes and observations that dramatize and illuminate the manifold facets of 'postal culture' in the antebellum United States. . . . a nuanced view of the complicated relationships between technologies and systems and social forms. "The Postal Age" is a major contribution to American social history and to the history of communications in general."--Geoffrey Nunberg, author of "Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Controversial Times"

As the hazards of carbon emissions increase and governments around the world seek to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, the search for clean and affordable alternate energies has become an increasing priority in the twenty-first century. However, one nation has already been producing such a fuel for almost a century: Brazil. Its sugarcane-based ethanol is the most efficient biofuel on the global fuel market, and the South American nation is the largest biofuel exporter in the world. Sweet Fuel offers the first full historical account of the industry's origins. The Brazilian government mandated a mixture of ethanol in the national fuel supply in the 1930s, and the success of the program led the military dictatorship to expand the industry and create the national program Proalcool in 1975. Private businessmen, politicians, and national and international automobile manufacturers together leveraged national interests to support this program. By 1985, over 95% of all new cars in the country ran exclusively on ethanol, and, after consumers turned away from them when oil was cheap, the government successfully promoted flex fuel cars instead. Yet, as Jennifer Eaglin shows, the industry's growth came with associated environmental and social costs in the form of water pollution from liquid waste generated during ethanol distillation and exploitative rural labor practices that reshaped Brazil's countryside. By examining the shifting perceptions of the industry from a sugar byproduct to a national energy solution to a global clean energy option, Sweet Fuel ultimately reveals deeper truths about what a global large-scale transition away from fossil fuels might look like and challenges idealized views of green industries.

This book brings to light central topics that are neglected in current histories and theories of architecture and urbanism. These include the role of imitation in earlier centuries and its potential role in present practice; the necessary relationship between architecture, urbanism and the rural districts; and their counterpart in the civil order that builds and uses what is built. The narrative traces two models for the practice of architecture. One follows the ancient model in which the architect renders his service to serve the interests of others; it survives and is dominant in modernism. The other, first formulated in the fifteenth century by Leon Battista Alberti, has the architect use his talent in coordination with others to contribute to the common good of a republican civil order that seeks to protect its own liberty and that of its citizens. Palladio practiced this way, and so did Thomas Jefferson when he founded a uniquely American architecture, the counterpart to the nation's founding. This narrative gives particular emphasis to the contrasting developments in architecture on the opposite sides of the English Channel. The book presents the value for clients and architects today and in the future of drawing on history and tradition. It stresses the importance, indeed, the urgency, of restoring traditional practices so that we can build just, beautiful, and sustainable cities and rural districts that will once again assist citizens in living not only abundantly but also well as they pursue their happiness.

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.

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.

'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.

"As befits a state in which coal, iron, and steel were the bulwarks of its industrial sector, Taft stresses that history of unionism among coal miners and iron and steel workers. Here we learn much about the experiences of the United Mine Workers of America and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee--United Steelworkers of America in the Deep South. Yet Taft does not neglect the history of other Alabama workers. Building tradesmen, railroad employees, textile millhands, and Gadsden's rubber workers all appear in the pages of this book. Here we have the most complete and modern history of a state labor movement in the South written from the perspective of its institutional leaders." --"American Historical Review"

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.

Unassuming but formidable, American maritime insurers used their position at the pinnacle of global trade to shape the new nation. The international information they gathered and the capital they generated enabled them to play central roles in state building and economic development. During the Revolution, they helped the U.S. negotiate foreign loans, sell state debts, and establish a single national bank. Afterward, they increased their influence by lending money to the federal government and to its citizens. Even as federal and state governments began to encroach on their domain, maritime insurers adapted, preserving their autonomy and authority through extensive involvement in the formation of commercial law. Leveraging their claims to unmatched expertise, they operated free from government interference while simultaneously embedding themselves into the nation's institutional fabric. By the early nineteenth century, insurers were no longer just risk assessors. They were nation builders and market makers. Deeply and imaginatively researched, Underwriters of the United States uses marine insurers to reveal a startlingly original story of risk, money, and power in the founding era.