The discourse around derelict, former industrial and military sites has grown in recent years. This interest is not only theoretical, and landscape professionals are taking new approaches to the design and development of these sites. This book examines the varied ways in which the histories and qualities of these derelict sites are reimagined in the transformed landscape and considers how such approaches can reveal the dramatic changes that have been wrought on these places over a relatively short time scale. It discusses these issues with reference to eleven sites from the UK, Germany, the USA, Australia and China, focusing specifically on how designers incorporate evidence of landscape change, both cultural and natural. There has been little research into how these developed landscapes are perceived by visitors and local residents. This book examines how the tangible material traces of pastness are interpreted by the visitor and the impact of the intangible elements - hidden traces, experiences and memories. The book draws together theory in the field and implications for practice in landscape architecture and concludes with an examination of how different approaches to revealing and reimagining change can affect the future management of the site.

The first edition (1973) was acclaimed and it firmly established the Shropshire Coalfield as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. After several reprints a new edition appeared in 1981, but since then there has been much further research, and re-examination of interpretations, prompting a completely re-written book with an entirely new structure, and with many more illustrations, all integrated with the relevant text. This is the book that made Ironbridge a place of international pilgrimage, and, in its new edition, provides a 21st-century explanation why!

From the Model T to today's "lean manufacturing": the assembly line as crucial, yet controversial, agent of social and economic transformation. The mechanized assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and satirized. (We can still picture Chaplin's little tramp trying to keep up with a factory conveyor belt.) In America's Assembly Line, David Nye examines the industrial innovation that made the United States productive and wealthy in the twentieth century. The assembly line-developed at the Ford Motor Company in 1913 for the mass production of Model Ts-first created and then served an expanding mass market. It also transformed industrial labor. By 1980, Japan had reinvented the assembly line as a system of "lean manufacturing"; American industry reluctantly adopted the new approach. Nye describes this evolution and the new global landscape of increasingly automated factories, with fewer industrial jobs in America and questionable working conditions in developing countries. A century after Ford's pioneering innovation, the assembly line continues to evolve toward more sustainable manufacturing.

Since the mid-1970s, the colloquial term zone has often been associated with the troubled post-war housing estates on the outskirts of large French cities. However, it once referred to a more circumscribed space: the zone non aedificandi (non-building zone) which encircled Paris from the 1840s to the 1940s. This unusual territory, although marginal in a social and geographical sense, came to occupy a central place in Parisian culture. Previous studies have focused on its urban and social history, or on particular ways in which it was represented during particular periods. By bringing together and analysing a wider range of sources from the duration of the zone's existence, this study offers a rich and nuanced account of how the area was perceived and used by successive generations of Parisian novelists (including Zola and Flaubert), poets, songwriters, artists, photographers, film-makers, politicians and town-planners. More generally, it aims to raise awareness of a neglected aspect of Parisian cultural history while pointing to links between current and past perceptions of the city's periphery.

The First World War is famous for the unprecedented loss of life on a global scale; it was a conflict that affected the world forever. However, it wasn't only in terms of bloodshed that the war rocked the nation: it also massively impacted the industrial integrity of Britain. This was a war not just of fighting, but of technological and industrial advances. All areas of industry, from aviation to food production, leapt ahead in terms of development over the four-year period: from the Wright Brothers in 1903 to the Sopwith Camel in 1917, and from the first motorcars to the tank within twenty years. On a social level, working Britain experienced change as well: with the men at war, it fell to the women of the country to keep the factories going, challenging preconceptions as they did. Here Anthony Burton shows how the First World War produced fundamental changes in British society.

"Works of Man" is a chronicle of man's attempts from prehistoric times to the space age to exploit for his own purposes the slowly discerned laws of nature. Exciting, instructive, and eminently readable, this mine of information covers the broad sweep of technological achievements, from the invention of the wheel more than six millennia ago to the miniaturization of the electronic computer.Beginning with a description of the early builders in the days of ancient Babylon, continuing through to the end of the Roman Empire, the author goes on to explain the engineering principles that were gradually developed in the Dark Ages, enabling men to build the medieval cathedrals; to try to drain the Pontine marshes near Rome, the meres of Holland, and the British fenlands; and to raise the new military defenses that transformed warfare. Discussion of the work of Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo leads on to the development of steam as a new source of power, and to the growth of civil engineering that followed in Europe and the rest of the world. Further chapters cover the change from sail to steam; canals; railways; the use of electricity; the growth of manned flight; the rise of the plastics industry; nuclear engineering; and the problems of space exploration.

Coal is a topic that has been, remains, and will continue to be of significant interest to those concerned with the causes, course and consequences of industrialization and de-industrialization. This six-volume, reset collection provides scholars with a wide variety of sources relating to the Victorian coal industry.

The oil industry in the United States has been the subject of innumerable histories. But books on the development of the natural gas industry and the electricity industry in the U.S. are scarce. "Edison to Enron" is a readable flowing history of two of America's largest and most colorful industries.

It begins with the story of Samuel Insull, a poor boy from England, who started his career as Thomas Edison's right-hand man, then went on his own and became one of America's top industrialists. But when Insull's General Electric's energy empire collapsed during the Great Depression, the hitherto Great Man was denounced and prosecuted and died a pauper. Against that backdrop, the book introduces Ken Lay, a poor boy from Missouri who began his career as an aide to the head of Humble oil, now part of Exxon Mobil. Lay went on to become a Washington bureaucrat and energy regulator and then became the "wunderkind" of the natural gas industry in the 1980s with Enron.

To connect the lives of these two energy giants, "Edison to Enron" takes the reader through the flamboyant history of the American energy industry, from Texas wildcatters to the great pipeline builders to the Washington wheeler-dealers.

From the Reviews...

"This scholarly work fills in much missing history about two of America's most important industries, electricity and natural gas."
--Joseph A. Pratt, NEH-Cullen Professor of History and Business, University of Houston

..". a remarkable book on the political inner workings of the U.S. energy industry."
--Robert Peltier, PE, Editor-in-Chief, "POWER Magazine"

"This is a powerful story, brilliantly told."
--Forrest McDonald, Historian

How much do you know about the big-name brands we live by? Virgin, BP, Land Rover, Barclays, Cadbury's, BBC and M&S. In our times the PLCs have been seen as giants, the backbone of commerce and society. Yet seen through a historical perspective they are vulnerable creatures, flowering only briefly. In fact, on the Fortune 500 - a roll-call of power if ever there was one - there's just one company, General Electric, which was on the list half a century ago. The rest have gone: broken, bankrupt, merged, raided for their parts. More like mayflies than megacorps. And getting more fragile all the time. The great corporations that now dominate our lives are treated by the law courts as if they were people.They have the same rights, but unlike us they have no emotions, morals or life histories.The only corporate biographies you find are celebratory, promotional portraits with the warts left out. So, we don't really know where most great brands came from or where they are going. This book spills the beans by telling the real life stories of some of the biggest corporate names, and finds them as dramatic, flawed and revealing as any human biography.

This selection of papers by major scholars introduces students to the history of the book in the West from late Antiquity to the publication of the Gutenberg Bible and the beginning of the print revolution. The collection opens with wide-ranging papers on handwriting and the physical make-up of the book. In the second group of papers the emphasis is on the 'look' of the book, complemented by a third group dealing with scribes, readers and the availability of books. The editors' introduction provides an overview of the medieval book.

In this elegantly written and far-reaching narrative, acclaimed author Gerard Koeppel tells the astonishing story of the creation of the Erie Canal and the memorable characters who turned a visionary plan into a successful venture. Koeppel's long years of research fill the pages with new findings about the construction of the canal and its enormous impact, providing a unique perspective on America's self perception as an empire destined to expand to the Pacific.

This collection of published papers on the development of the publishing cycle from author to reader includes work by many of the leading authorities on the history of the book in the nineteenth century, including James Barnes, Simon Eliot, Kate Flint, Elizabeth McHenry, Robert Patten, David Vincent and Ronald Zboray. It contains examples of different approaches, reflecting the fact that scholars come from a variety of disciplinary traditions, such as bibliography, typography, literary studies, library studies and the history of science. The introduction provides an overview of both the historical context and recent work on the subject. The volume is divided into five sections: National Publishing Structures in America, France, and Russia; International Trade; Publishing Practices; Distribution; Reading. The collection includes work in the tradition of French book history which has focussed on the systems and structures of the publishing industry and Anglo-American book history characterised by detailed analyses of the publication of a specific title or the practices of an individual reader.

A commercial company established in 1600 to monopolize trade between England and the Far East, the East India Company grew to govern an Indian empire. Exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in European engagement with Asia, "Indian Ink "examines the Company at work and reveals how writing and print shaped authority on a global scale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Tracing the history of the Company from its first tentative trading voyages in the early seventeenth century to the foundation of an empire in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, Miles Ogborn takes readers into the scriptoria, ships, offices, print shops, coffeehouses, and palaces to investigate the forms of writing needed to exert power and extract profit in the mercantile and imperial worlds. Interpreting the making and use of a variety of forms of writing in script and print, Ogborn argues that material and political circumstances always undermined attempts at domination through the power of the written word.
Navigating the juncture of imperial history and the history of the book, "Indian Ink "uncovers the intellectual and political legacies of early modern trade and empire and charts a new understanding of the geography of print culture.

Until recently, historians tended to stress the perceived technological and ecological shortcomings of medieval agriculture. The ten essays assembled in this volume offer a contrary view. Based upon close documentary analysis of the demesne farms managed for and by lords, they show that, by 1300, in the most commercialized parts of England, production decisions were based upon relative factor costs and commodity prices. Moreover, when and where economic conditions were ripe and environmental and institutional circumstances favourable, medieval cultivators successfully secured high and ecologically sustainable levels of land productivity. They achieved this by integrating crop and livestock production into the sort of manure-intensive systems of mixed-husbandry which later underpinned the more celebrated output growth of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If medieval agriculture failed to fulfill the production potential provided by wider adoption of such systems, this is more appropriately explained by the want of the kind of market incentives that might have justified investment, innovation, and specialization on the scale that characterized the so-called 'agricultural revolution', than either the lack of appropriate agricultural technology or the innate 'backwardness' of medieval cultivators.

In 1950, Mexican American miners went on strike for fair working conditions in Hanover, New Mexico. When an injunction prohibited miners from picketing, their wives took over the picket lines - an unprecedented act that disrupted mining families but ultimately ensured the strikers' victory in 1952. In ""On Strike and on Film"", Ellen Baker examines the building of a leftist union that linked class justice to ethnic equality. She shows how women's participation in union activities paved the way for their taking over the picket lines and thereby forcing their husbands, and the union, to face troubling questions about gender equality. Baker also explores the collaboration between mining families and blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers that resulted in the controversial 1954 film ""Salt of the Earth"". She shows how this worker-artist alliance gave the mining families a unique chance to clarify the meanings of the strike in their own lives and allowed the filmmakers to create a progressive alternative to Hollywood productions. An inspiring story of working-class solidarity, Mexican American dignity, and women's liberation, ""Salt of the Earth"" was itself blacklisted by powerful anticommunists, yet the movie has endured as a vital contribution to American cinema.

Throughout the 19th century, the shipbuilding industry in America was both art and craft, one based on tradition, instinct, hand tools, and handmade ship models. Even as mechanization was introduced, the trade supported a system of apprenticeship, master builders, and family dynasties, and aesthetics remained the basis for design. Spanning the transition from wood to iron shipbuilding in America, Thiesen's history tells how practical and nontheoretical methods of shipbuilding began to be discarded by the 1880s in favor of technical and scientific methods. Perceiving that British warships were superior to its own, the United States Navy set out to adopt British design principles and methods. American shipbuilders wanted only to build better warships, but embracing British practices exposed them to new methods and technologies that aided in the transformation of American shipbuilding into an engineering-based industry. American shipbuilders soon improvised ways to turn U.S. shipyards into state-of-the-art facilities and, by the early 20th century, they forged ahead of the British in construction and production methods. The history of shipbuilding in America is a story of culture dictating technology. Thiesen describes the trans-Atlantic exchange of technical information that took place during this era and the role of the U.S. Navy in that transfer. He also profiles the lives of individual shipbuilders. Their stories will inspire enthusiasts of ships, shipbuilding, and shipbuilding technology, as well as historians and students of maritime history and the history of technology.

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.

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

Closely linked essays examine distinctive national patterns of industrialization. This collection of essays offers new perspectives on the Industrial Revolution as a global phenomenon. The fifteen contributors go beyond the longstanding view of industrialization as a linear process marked by discrete stages. Instead, they examine a lengthy and creative period in the history of industrialization, 1750 to 1914, reassessing the nature of and explanations for England's industrial primacy, and comparing significant industrial developments in countries ranging from China to Brazil. Each chapter explores a distinctive national production ecology, a complex blend of natural resources, demographic pressures, cultural impulses, technological assets, and commercial practices. At the same time, the chapters also reveal the portability of skilled workers and the permeability of political borders. The Industrial Revolution comes to life in discussions of British eagerness for stylish, middle-class products; the Enlightenment's contribution to European industrial growth; early America's incremental (rather than revolutionary) industrialization; the complex connections between Czarist and Stalinist periods of industrial change in Russia; Japan's late and rapid turn to mechanized production; and Brazil's industrial-financial boom. By exploring unique national patterns of industrialization as well as reciprocal exchanges and furtive borrowing among these states, the book refreshes the discussion of early industrial transformations and raises issues still relevant in today's era of globalization.

In late eighteenth-century Britain a handful of men brought about the greatest transformation in human history. Inventors, industrialists and entrepreneurs ushered in the age of powered machinery and the factory, and thereby changed the whole of human society, bringing into being new methods of social and economic organisation, new social classes, and new political forces. The Industrial Revolution also dramatically altered humanity's relation to the natural world and embedded the belief that change, not stasis, is the necessary backdrop for human existence. Iron, Steam and Money tells the thrilling story of those few decades, the moments of inspiration, the rivalries, skulduggery and death threats, and the tireless perseverance of the visionaries who made it all happen. Richard Arkwright, James Watt, Richard Trevithick and Josiah Wedgwood are among the giants whose achievements and tragedies fill these pages. In this authoritative study Roger Osborne also shows how and why the revolution happened, revealing pre-industrial Britain as a surprisingly affluent society, with wealth spread widely through the population, and with craft industries in every town, village and front parlour. The combination of disposable income, widespread demand for industrial goods, and a generation of time-served artisans created the unique conditions that propelled humanity into the modern world. The industrial revolution was arguably the most important episode in modern human history; Iron, Steam and Money reminds us of its central role, while showing the extraordinary excitement of those tumultuous decades.

The strike of 1984/5 cut deep into the traditional mining communities yet in the midst of this wholesale destruction something unexpected happened. From the dark corners of obscurity came the voices of the wives, mothers and daughters of miners - previously unheard, inexperienced, unrehearsed. Out of desperation they found the strength and courage to not only stand and fight alongside their men but to become political activists in their own right. Overnight they mastered the media, learnt which journalists to trust and began to appear in the newspapers, and on radio and TV. But when the strike ended in defeat the media lost interest. The women were dumped, allowed to slip back into the shadows. For some the strike brought about a change; they had seen an existence beyond the slagheaps and embraced it. For others the end of the strike meant coming back to earth with a bump. Two decades later Triona Holden, who was one of the BBC correspondents reporting on the strike, takes the reader into the lives of these remarkable women and reveals that what is good and inextinguishable about the mining communities lives on in these women's articulate, funny and frank stories.

In 1998, there was the latest in a long and complex history of takeovers that had bedevilled Rolls-Royce and Bentley since the companies were founded. This resulted in Volkswagen taking ownership of the factory in Crewe, together with the Bentley range and name, while BMW moved Rolls-Royce production to a new site in Sussex. On 30 August 2002, the last Crewe-built Rolls-Royce rolled off the production line, bringing the era of Crewe-built Rolls-Royces to an end. Peter Ollerhead, an ex-Rolls-Royce employee, has spent years researching the history of the company in Crewe, from 1938 to 1998, focusing on the endeavours and the experiences of its employees: this is a book about people. The detailed text, illustrated with over 80 photographs, explains how the initial establishment of a Merlin aero engine factory was thwarted by the problems of building on a greenfield site, where the early days of skill shortages, a chronic need for housing and a strike were followed by a bombing raid in 1940, in which seventeen employees were killed. The arrival of car production just after the Second World War is fully covered, as are the other enterprises that helped to keep the company afloat, from War Department power units to hip joints for the NHS. Despite a troubled history - with two major fires, bankruptcy and large-scale redundancies - Rolls-Royce was Crewe's largest employer for many years, produced the world's best luxury cars, and influenced and shaped the town as no other company has done. This book is a fitting tribute to the generations of workers who made it all possible.

Just over 100 years ago, a small engineering concern in Vauxhall, South London, made its first motor car. Named after the place it was built, the Vauxhall was a revelation. Within a few years of expansion, production had moved to Luton. Vauxhall was purchased in the 1920s by General Motors and its most famous models include its Edwardian Prince Henry, the PA Cresta, perhaps the most distinctive of its American-styled cars, as well as the Astra, Cavalier and its 1970s rally winning cars such as the Firenza and Chevette. Since the 1950s, Vauxhall has remained one of Britain's most popular car makes, with many millions of its cars sold worldwide. Its F-type Victor was at one time the biggest export earner for Britain with over 200,000 sold abroad and the PA was the first true motorway cruiser built in Britain. Vauxhall: A History tells the story of the cars, the people that built them and also of Bedford, the truck and van division of Vauxhall.

Marchon was one of Whitehaven's largest employers, employing over 4500 people directly and indirectly at their Whitehaven plant. This book tells the story of one of the cottage industry rising to an international industrial giant and then back to nothing again, with the plant closing in the early 1980s.

Lady Charlotte (1812-95) was one of the successful women of nineteenth century. She married Josiah John Guest and moved from Lincolnshire to industrial South Wales. Through this woman's life, this book explores the impact of industrialisation on British society, Wales' literary heritage and importance of gender in Victorian society.