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Stacks of stone preside over many bucolic and wooded landscapes in
the mid-Atlantic states. Initially constructed more than two
hundred years ago, they housed blast furnaces that converted rock
and wood into the iron that enabled the United States to secure its
national independence. By the eve of the Revolutionary War,
furnaces and forges in the American colonies turned out one-seventh
of the world's iron.Forging America illuminates the fate of labor
in an era when industry, manhood, and independence began to take on
new and highly charged meanings. John Bezis-Selfa argues that the
iron industry, with its early concentrations of capital and labor,
reveals the close links between industrial and political
revolution. Through means ranging from religious exhortation to
force, ironmasters encouraged or compelled workers free,
indentured, and enslaved to adopt new work styles and standards of
personal industry. Eighteenth-century revolutionary rhetoric
hastened the demise of indentured servitude, however, and national
independence reinforced the legal status of slavery and
increasingly defined manual labor as "dependent" and racially
coded. Bezis-Selfa highlights the importance of slave labor to
early American industrial development. Research in documents from
the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries led
Bezis-Selfa to accounts of the labor of African-Americans,
indentured servants, new immigrants, and others. Their stories
inform his highly readable narrative of more than two hundred years
of American history."
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