Clanging: Belfast in its industrial pomp must have been noisy: shipyards manipulating sheets of metal, the constant riveting being only one source of racket; the endless clatter from linen mills, the screeching of trams on unyielding rails, sirens and hooters marking time at the factories. There were steam trains and steam engines in addition to horses' hooves beating on the streets. The rumbustious, often riotous, eternally spirited Belfast people packed into the terraced houses as well as the alleys would have added their din, especially around the drinking dens. The noise is gone, one aspect of the urban past that cannot be recreated. However, the industrial city has left other remembrances, from many buildings which still grace the post-industrial city, to the humdrum details of citizens' lives revealed in newspapers, to more formal sources such as the corporation's minute books, the deliberations of the Linen Merchants' Association and the sometimes shocking revelations in parliamentary reports. Utilising where possible contemporary materials, this book details Belfast's development from the eighteenth century market town, where only hindsight can discover the seeds of industrial greatness, to the titanic city - in every respect - of the period prior to Great War, whose horrors were to usher in such changes. Belfast was a success: its unparalleled growth, its might in textiles, shipbuilding and other industries. However, the book cannot, does not, shy away from the darkness that imbued the clanging city, from the health problems of mill workers to the poverty behind the well-lit main streets a 'charnel house breaking in upon the gaiety and glitter of a bridal' as one description inelegantly had it. Then there were, of course, the 'intestine broils', the sectarian conflicts that blighted Belfast in the nineteenth century, as they were to do in the twentieth.

In this collective biography spanning four generations, Howard Covington explores how one prestigious family shaped the development of Piedmont North Carolina, particularly the city of Durham. Covington examines the lives and legacies of George Washington Watts; his son-in-law, John Sprunt Hill; and Hill's son, George Watts Hill, and grandson, George Watts Hill Jr., analyzing the personalities, beliefs, relationships, and life forces that propelled these four men to become leading figures of their generations.
Perhaps best known for such family businesses as Central Carolina Bank, the Carolina Inn, and Watts Hospital, and for their partnership in the American Tobacco Company, Watts and the Hills were also advocates for education, fair banking, credit unions, and health insurance. Active in both local and statewide politics, they worked for major infrastructure changes, including a better highway system and the development of Research Triangle Park, and all left lasting legacies.

"A superb history of labor on the East Coast waterfront that may be the best account we have, not only of the industry, but of any sector of labor relations. Mello combines a thoroughly researched discussion of the behavior of elites--employers, government, and union officials--with a story of the heroic resistance of rank-and-file dockers to the best laid plans of their adversaries."--Stanley Aronowitz, CUNY Graduate Center There exists a hidden history of post-World War II New York and East Coast waterfront labor relations. During this era, dockworkers fought an ongoing battle against shipping companies, local police, federal and state political authorities, and their own corrupt union leadership. "New York Longshoremen" reveals how labor relations on the docks were driven from below by radical and reform rank-and-file movements led by communists, Catholics, and local union leaders. William Mello uncovers this little-known history that depicts the impact of state and local politics and political institutions on the labor movement in postwar America. He looks at power and collective action, as well as institutional and social movements, specifically analyzing the intersection of labor and its impact on political development. Interviews, meticulous examinations of newspaper accounts, official reports, rank-and-file newsletters, and oral histories establish the contours of Mello's work. This rich historical account illustrates how ordinary workers defied the combined powers of elites and sporadically imposed their will on labor relations.

Founded in 1957, the Southern California suburb prophetically named City of Industry today represents, in the words of Victor Valle, ""The gritty crossroads of the global trade revolution that is transforming Southern California factories into warehouses, and adjacent working class communities into economic and environmental sacrifice zones choking on cheap goods and carcinogenic diesel exhaust."""City of Industry" is a stunning expose on the construction of corporate capitalist spaces.

Valle investigated an untapped archive of Industry's built landscape, media coverage, and public records, including sealed FBI reports, to uncover a cascading series of scandals. A kaleidoscopic view of the corruption that resulted when local land owners, media barons, and railroads converged to build the city, this suspenseful narrative explores how new governmental technologies and engineering feats propelled the rationality of privatization using their property-owning servants as tools.

Valle's tale of corporate greed begins with the city's founder James M. Stafford and ends with present day corporate heir, Edward Roski Jr., the nation's biggest industrial developeruco-owner of the L.A. Staples Arena and possible future owner of California's next NFL franchise. Not to be forgotten in Valle's captivating story are Latino working class communities living within Los Angeles's distribution corridors, who suffer wealth disparities and exposure to air pollution as a result of diesel-burning trucks, trains, and container ships that bring global trade to their very doorsteps. They are among the many victims of City of Industry.

Out of the Hay and into the Hops explores the history and development of hop cultivation in the Weald of Kent together with the marketing of this important crop in the Borough at Southwark (where a significant proportion of Wealden hops were sold). A picture emerges of the relationship between the two activities, as well as of the impact this rural industry had upon the lives of the people engaged in it. Dr Cordle draws extensively on personal accounts of hop work to evoke a way of life now lost for good. Oral history, together with evidence from farm books and other sources, records how the steady routine of hop ploughing and dung spreading, weeding and spraying contrasted with the bustle and excitement of hop picking (bringing in, as it did, many itinerant workers from outside the community to help with the harvest) and the anxious period of drying the crop. For hops, prey to the vagaries of weather and disease, needed much care and attention to bring them to fruition. In early times their cultivation provided work for more people than any other crop. The diverse processes of hop cultivation are examined within the wider context of events such as the advent of rail and the effects of war, as are changes to the working practices and technologies used, and their reception and implementation in the Weald. Meanwhile, in the Borough, an enclave of hop factors and merchants, whose interests sometimes conflicted with those of the hop growers, arose and then suffered decline. A full account of this trade is presented, including day-to-day working practices, links with the Weald, and the changes in hop marketing following Britain's entry into the European Economic Community. This book provides readers with a fascinating analysis of some three hundred years of hop history in the Weald and the Borough. Hops still grow in the Weald; in the Borough, the Le May facade and the gates of the Hop Exchange are reminders of former trade.

Puerto Rico, Hawai'i, and California share the experiences of conquest and annexation to the United States in the nineteenth century and mass organizational struggles by rural workers in the twentieth. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW offers a comparative examination of those struggles, which were the era's longest and most protracted campaigns by agricultural workers, supported by organized labour, to establish a collective presence and realize the fruits of democracy. Dionicio Nodin Valdes examines critical links between the earlier conquests and the later organizing campaigns while he corrects a number of popular misconceptions about agriculture, farm-workers, and organized labour. He shows that agricultural workers have engaged in continuous efforts to gain a place in the institutional life of the nation, that unions succeeded before the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, and that the labour movement played a major role in those efforts. He also offers a window into understanding crucial limitations of institutional democracy in the United States, and demonstrates that the widespread lack of participation in the nation's institutions by agricultural workers has not been due to a lack of volition, but rather to employers' continuous efforts to prevent worker empowerment. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW demonstrates how employers benefitted not only from power and wealth, but also from imperialism in both its domestic and international manifestations. It also demonstrates how workers at times successfully overcame growers' advantages, although they were ultimately unable to sustain movements and gain a permanent institutional presence in Puerto Rico and California.

Reforming Urban Labor is a history of the nineteenth-century social reforms designed by middle-class progressives to domesticate the labor force. Industrial production required a concentrated labor force, but the swelling masses of workers in the capitals of Britain and Belgium, the industrial powerhouses of Europe, threatened urban order. At night, after factories had closed, workers and their families sheltered in the shadowy alleyways of Brussels and London. Reformers worked to alleviate the danger, dispersing the laborers and their families throughout the suburbs and the countryside. National governments subsidized rural housing construction and regulated workmen's trains to transport laborers nightly away from their urban work sites and to bring them back again in the mornings; municipalities built housing in the suburbs. On both sides of the Channel, respectable working families were removed from the rookeries and isolated from the marginally employed, planted out beyond the cities where they could live like, but not with, the middle classes.

In Janet L. Polasky's urban history, comparisons of the two capitals are interwoven in the context of industrial Europe as a whole. Reforming Urban Labor sets urban planning against the backdrop of idealized rural images, links transportation and housing reform, investigates the relationship of middle-class reformers with industrial workers and their families, and explores the cooperation as well as the competition between government and the private sector in the struggle to control the built environment and its labor force.

The charivari is a loud, late-night surprise house-visiting custom from members of a community, usually to a newlywed couple, accompanied by a qu?te (a request for a treat or money in exchange for the noisy performance) and/or pranks. Up to the first decades of the twentieth century, charivaris were for the most part enacted to express disapproval of the relationship that was their focus, such as those between individuals of different ages, races, or religions. While later charivaris maintained the same rituals, their meaning changed to a welcoming of the marriage.

Make the Night Hideous explores this mysterious transformation using four detailed case studies from different time periods and locations across English Canada, as well as first-person accounts of more recent charivari participants. Pauline Greenhill's unique and fascinating work explores the malleability of a tradition, its continuing value, and its contestation in a variety of discourses.

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.

Enclosing Water is an environmental history of the Industrial Revolution, as inscribed on the Liri valley in Italy's Central Apennines. Amid forces of revolution and empire, and Enlightenment discourses of 'improvement' and political economy, the Liri's natural wealth - water-power - generated sweeping changes in its landscape and working and living environments. This book tells the story of how defining water as property - both materially and discursively - led to the emergence of an industrial riverscape, and of a concomitant new ecological consciousness; to heightened environmental risks and awareness of those risks. A dramatic century in the Liri's socio-environmental history, with its cast of new industrial bourgeoisie, engineers and civil servants, illuminates how material developments and ideological currents completely reshaped the relationship between society and nature at the periphery of 19th century Europe. By integrating Political Economy into the narrative of European environmental history, this pioneering book offers a critical new view of discourses of water disorder and environmental politics in the Mediterranean region.

In the late 19th century, rails from Bethlehem Steel helped build the United States into the world's foremost economy. During the 1890s, Bethlehem became America's leading supplier of heavy armaments, and by 1914, it had pioneered new methods of structural steel manufacture that transformed urban skylines. Demand for its war materials during World War I provided the finance for Bethlehem to become the world's second-largest steel maker. As late as 1974, the company achieved record earnings of $342 million. But in the 1980s and 1990s, through wildly fluctuating times, losses outweighed gains, and Bethlehem struggled to downsize and reinvest in newer technologies. By 2001, in financial collapse, it reluctantly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Two years later, International Steel Group acquired the company for $1.5 billion. In Bethlehem Steel, Kenneth Warren presents an original and compelling history of a leading American company, examining the numerous factors contributing to the growth of this titan and those that eventually felled it-along with many of its competitors in the U.S. steel industry. Warren considers the investment failures, indecision and slowness to abandon or restructure outdated \u201cintegrated\u201d plants plaguing what had become an insular, inward-looking management group. Meanwhile competition increased from more economical \u201cmini mills\u201d at home and from new, technologically superior plants overseas, which drove world prices down, causing huge flows of imported steel into the United States. Bethlehem Steel provides a fascinating case study in the transformation of a major industry from one of American dominance to one where America struggled to survive.

"The Subterrranean Forest" studies the historical transition from the agrarian solar energy regime to the use of fossil energy, which has fuelled the industrial transformation of the last 200 years. The author argues that the analysis of historical energy systems provides an explanation for the basic patterns of different social formations. It is the availability of free energy that defines the framework within which socio-metabolic processes can take place. This thesis explains why the industrial revolution started in Britain, where coal was readily available and firewood already depleted or difficult to transport, whereas Germany, with its huge forests next to rivers, was much later. This landmark text was originally published in German in 1982 and was thoroughly revised and updated for the White Horse Press in 2001.

Austin, Hillman, Morris, Standard and Wolseley were a handful of the myriad marques that once constituted Britain's indigenous motor industry. Born in 1896 into the high summer of Victorian prosperity, the native British industry survived until the collapse of The Rover Group in 2005. Jonathan Wood chronicles this industry's 109-year life, from its production of hand-made bespoke automobiles for the fortunate few to the arrival of mass production to provide cars for the many. He looks at the factories and the people who worked in them, and examines the role played by the component manufacturers that serviced the industry. Wood also offers explanations as to why motor manufacturing followed the British motorcycle, bicycle and cotton industries into oblivion.

The culmination of a century-long dream to link the Great Lakes interior industrial hubs to the Atlantic Ocean, the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project stands as one of the largest and most important public works' initiatives of the twentieth century. Seen as vital to North American commerce and strategic in advancing America's position on the world stage, the billion dollar seaway and power dam were also a phenomenal feat of engineering involving an unprecedented level of cooperation between Canadian and American agencies and the unrelenting efforts of workers on both sides of the border. Dubbed the greatest construction show on earth, the largest waterway and hydro dam project ever jointly built by two nations consisted of seven locks, the widening of various canals, the taming of rapids, and the erection of the 3216-foot long, 195.5-foot high Robert Moses - Robert H. Saunders Power Dam. In this book, Claire Puccia Parham reveals the human side of the project in the words of its engineers, laborers, and carpenters. Drawing on firsthand accounts, she provides a vivid portrait of the lives of the men who built the seaway and the women who accompanied them. On the fiftieth anniversary of the dedication of the power dam and waterway, this book is a fitting tribute to the hard work and dedication of the project's 22,000 workers.

"A damning new history . . .Jeffreys brings a rare combination of forensic acumen and narrative flair." --"Chicago Tribune"

At its peak in the 1930s, the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben was one of the most powerful corporations in the world. To this day, companies formerly part of the Farben cartel--the aspirin maker Bayer, the graphics supplier Agfa, the plastics giant BASF--continue to play key roles in the global market. IG Farben itself, however, is remembered mostly for its infamous connections to the Nazi Party and its complicity in the atrocities of the Holocaust. After the war, Farben's leaders were tried for crimes that included mass murder and exploitation of slave labor.

In "Hell's Cartel," Diarmuid Jeffreys presents the first comprehensive account of IG Farben's rise and fall, tracing the enterprise from its nineteenth-century origins, when the discovery of synthetic dyes gave rise to a vibrant new industry, through the upheavals of the Great War era, and on to the company's fateful role in World War II. Named one of the best books of the year by "Business Week," "Hell's Cartel" sheds new light on the codependence of industry and the Third Reich, and offers a timely warning against the dangerous merger of politics and the pursuit of profit.

Heralded by Soviet propaganda as the "Path to the Future," the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway (BAM) represented the hopes and dreams of Brezhnev and the Communist Party elite of the late Soviet era. Begun in 1974, and spanning approximately 2,000 miles after twenty-nine years of halting construction, the BAM project was intended to showcase the national unity, determination, skill, technology, and industrial might that Soviet socialism claimed to embody. More pragmatically, the Soviet leadership envisioned the BAM railway as a trade route to the Pacific, where markets for Soviet timber and petroleum would open up, and as an engine for the development of Siberia.

Despite these aspirations and the massive commitment of economic resources on its behalf, BAM proved to be a boondoggle-a symbol of late communism's dysfunctionality-and a cruel joke to many ordinary Soviet citizens. In reality, BAM was woefully bereft of quality materials and construction, and victimized by poor planning and an inferior workforce. Today, the railway is fully complete, but remains a symbol of the profligate spending and inefficiency that characterized the Brezhnev years.

In "Brezhnev's Folly, " Christopher J. Ward provides a groundbreaking social history of the BAM railway project. He examines the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of workers from the diverse republics of the USSR and other socialist countries, and his extensive archival research and interviews with numerous project workers provide an inside look at the daily life of the BAM workforce. We see firsthand the disorganization, empty promises, dire living and working conditions, environmental damage, and acts of crime, segregation, and discrimination that constituted daily life during the project's construction. Thus, perhaps, we also see the final irony of BAM: that the most lasting legacy of this misguided effort to build Soviet socialism is to shed historical light on the profound ills afflicting a society in terminal decline.

In this corporate history of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Nannie M. Tilley recounts the story of Richard Joshua Reynolds and the vast R. J. Reynolds tobacco complex with precision and drama.
Reynolds's rise in the tobacco industry began in 1891 when he introduced saccharin as an ingredient in chewing tobacco. Forced into James B. Duke's American Tobacco Company in 1899, the Reynolds company became the agency for consolidating the flat plug industry. In 1907, as the government began its antitrust suit against Duke, Reynolds himself bucked the trust and introduced another bestseller: Prince Albert smoking tobacco. The government won its suit in 1911; Duke's Tobacco Combination was dissolved, and Reynolds, left with a free and independent company, a much larger plant, and improved machinery, immediately began an expansion program.
In 1913 Reynolds introduced Camels, a blend of Burley and flue-cured tobacco with some Turkish leaf. Perhaps the best-known cigarette ever produced, Camels swept the market and generally led the way until the development of filter-tipped cigarettes in the 1950s.
Other important Reynolds advances include the systematic purchase and storage of leaf tobacco, the development of a stemming machine, the adoption of cellophane for wrapping cigarettes, and the production of cigarette paper. For its employees, the company established a medical department, introduced lunch rooms and day nurseries, and installed group life insurance. Perhaps more important than any of these items was the development of reconstituted leaf, a method of combining scrap tobacco and stems into a fine elastic leaf entirely suitable for use in any tobacco product. This achievement represented a savings of 25 percent in the cost of leaf and was followed by the development of the filter-tipped Winstons and Salems.
"The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company" includes absorbing accounts of the company's steady technological progress, its labor problems and advances, and its influential role in North Carolina and in the industry through 1962.

Corporations often move factories to areas where production costs, notably labor, taxes, and regulations, are sharply lower than in the original company hometowns. Not every company, however, followed this trend. One of America's most iconic firms, the Campbell Soup Company, was one such exception: it found ways to achieve low-cost production while staying in its original location, Camden, New Jersey, until 1990.

The first in-depth history of the Campbell Soup Company and its workers, Condensed Capitalism is also a broader exploration of strategies that companies have used to keep costs down besides relocating to cheap labor havens: lean production, flexible labor sourcing, and uncompromising antiunionism. Daniel Sidorick's study of a classic firm that used these methods for over a century has, therefore, special relevance in current debates about capital mobility and the shifting powers of capital and labor. Sidorick focuses on the engine of the Campbell empire: the soup plants in Camden where millions of cans of food products rolled off the production line daily. It was here that management undertook massive efforts to drive down costs so that the marketing and distribution functions of the company could rely on a limitless supply of products to sell at rock-bottom prices. It was also here that thousands of soup makers struggled to gain some control over their working lives and livelihoods, countering company power with their own strong union local.

Campbell's low-cost strategies and the remarkable responses these elicited from its workers tell a story vital to understanding today's global economy. Condensed Capitalism reveals these strategies and their consequences through a narrative that shows the mark of great economic and social forces on the very human stories of the people who spent their lives filling those familiar red-and-white cans.

Trains have a nostalgic connotation for most Americans, but John Stilgoe argues that we should be looking to rail lines as the path to our future, not just our past. Train Time picks up where his acclaimed work Metropolitan Corridor left off, carrying Stilgoe's ideas about the spatial consequences of railways up to the present moment. With containers bringing the production of a global economy to our ports, the price of oil skyrocketing, and congestion and sprawl forcing many Americans to live far from work, trains offer an obvious alternative to a culture dependent on cars and long-haul trucking. Arguing that the train is returning, "an economic and cultural tsunami about to transform the United States," Stilgoe posits a future for railways as powerful shapers of American life.

For anyone looking for prescient analysis and compelling history of the American landscape and economy in general and railroad and transit history in particular, Train Time is an engaging look at the future of our railroads and of transportation and land development. For those familiar with John Stilgoe's talent for seeing things that elude the rest of us, and delivering those observations in pithy asides about real estate, corporate culture, and other aspects of American life, this book will not disappoint.

Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) was one of the great pioneers of electrical science. His ideas led to huge advances in communications and now form much of the bedrock of electrical engineering - every textbook and every college course bears his stamp. Despite having little formal education he created the mathematical tools that were to prove essential to the proper understanding and use of electricity. At first his ideas were thought to be outrageous and he had to battle long and hard against ignorance, prejudice and vested interests to get them accepted. Yet they are now so much a part of everyday electrical science that they are simply taken for granted and our great debt to him is rarely acknowledged. Caring nothing for social or mathematical conventions, he lived a fiercely independent life, much of the time close to poverty. His writings reveal a personality like no other and are laced with wickedly irreverent humour; he is by far the funniest author of scientific papers. Basil Mahon combines a compelling account of Heaviside's life with a powerful insight into his scientific thinking and the reasons for its enduring influence.

In 1909 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, on his way back to South Africa from London, wrote his now celebrated tract "Hind Swaraj," laying out his vision for the future of India and famously rejecting the technological innovations of Western civilization. Despite his protestations, Western technology endured and helped to make India one of the leading economies in our globalized world. Few would question the dominant role that technology plays in modern life, but to fully understand how India first advanced into technological modernity, argues David Arnold, we must consider the technology of the everyday. "Everyday Technology" is a pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate "big" technologies such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their impact on the ways in which people worked and traveled, the clothes they wore, and the kind of food they ate. But the effects of these machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood. Arnold's fascinating book offers new perspectives on the globalization of modern technologies and shows us that to truly understand what modernity became, we need to look at the everyday experiences of people in all walks of life, taking stock of how they repurposed small technologies to reinvent their world and themselves.