Machinists And Blacksmiths International Journal

Lives of the Philadelphia Engineers examines the emergence of a new class of industrial entrepreneur and the world it confronted and shaped. Historians are reluctant to examine nineteenth-century American business leaders as a social group and this study helps remedy the defect. This book interweaves a history of the social and economic development of the largest centre of machine building in nineteenth-century America with the dramatic political narrative of sectional conflict, Civil War and Reconstruction. Crossing and re-crossing the boundary between industrial and political history, it throws new light on the process of industrialisation, the Civil War conflict, and the contested governance of nineteenth-century cities. While this study is firmly rooted in the experience of Philadelphia's machine builders, its historiographic significance extends to many of the important themes of mid-century American history. By rejecting the conventional viewpoint that timid manufacturers were conservative supporters of the plantation South and insisting that workshop owners rejected slavery, this study reinvigorates one of the Civil War's enduring interpretative battles. Of interest to scholars of business, economic, social, labour, education, urban and Civil War history, it will no doubt stimulate further debate and add a new angle to our understanding of nineteenth-century America.

This book studies the changing ways in which American industrial workers mobilised concerted action in their own interests between the abolition of slavery and the end of open immigration from Europe and Asia. Sustained class conflict between 1916 and 1922 reshaped governmental and business policies, but left labour largely unorganised and in retreat. The House of Labor, so arduously erected by working-class activists during the preceeding generation, did not collapse, but ossified, so that when labour activism was reinvigorated after 1933, the movement split in two. These developments are analysed here in ways which stress the links between migration, neighbourhood life, racial subjugation, business reform, the state, and the daily experience of work itself.

"For anyone who believes that there was no important labor movement before Roosevelt, or before Gompers, or before the Knights of Labor, this well-documented work should prove a shocker. And for those who look to the past for enlightenment to guide us through our troubled tomorrows, this book is a reservoir of historic information and insights." -- New Leader "Beyond Equality is a masterpiece. . . . A book of bold and brilliant originality, it is now shaping the perspective of a new generation of graduate students." -- David Brion Davis, author of The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture