Download or read book The Path to Mechanized Shoe Production in the United States written by Ross Thomson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-08-25 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1800, shoes in the United States were made by craftsmen, each trained to create an entire shoe. A century later, shoes were mass-produced in factories employing dozens of machines and specialized workers. Ross Thomson describes this transition from craft to mechanized production in one of the largest American industries of the nineteenth century. Early shoe machinery originated through innovations made by shoemakers, tailors, and especially machinists. It continued to evolve through a process of "learning by selling," in which sales of one generation of machines led to technological learning and ongoing invention by those who used, serviced, and sold them. As a result of this process, the mechanization of the shoe industry and the manufacturers of the machinery it used -- including such firms as Singer and United Shoe Machinery -- evolved together. In researching the process of industrialization, Thomson examined nearly 8,000 patents. Comparing the patent information with directories for more than eighty American cities, he was able to find out who the inventors were, who employed them, how many patents they held, and the extent to which their inventions were used. Originally published in 1989. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Download or read book Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age written by Ross Thomson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-05-08 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States registered phenomenal economic growth between the establishment of the new republic and the end of the Civil War. Ross Thomson's fresh study accounts for the unprecedented technological innovations that helped propel antebellum growth. Thomson argues that the transition of the United States from an agrarian economy in 1790 to an industrial leader in 1865 relied fundamentally on the spread of technological knowledge within and across industries. Essential to this spread was a dense web of knowledge-diffusing institutions—new occupations and industries, the patent office, machine shops, mechanics’ associations, scientific societies, public colleges, and the civil engineering profession. Together they composed an integrated innovation system that generated, disseminated, and employed new technical knowledge across ever-widening ranges of the economy. To trace technological change in fourteen major industries and the economy as a whole, Thomson analyzes 14,000 patents, the records of two dozen machinery firms, census data for 1,800 companies, and hundreds of business directories. This exhaustive research leads to his interesting interpretation of technological diffusion and development. Thomson's impressive study of the infrastructure that fueled and supported the young country’s economic and industrial successes will interest students of economic, technological, and business history.
Download or read book Transforming Women s Work written by Thomas L. Dublin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I am not living upon my friends or doing housework for my board but am a factory girl," asserted Anna Mason in the early 1850s. Although many young women who worked in the textile mills found that the industrial revolution brought greater independence to their lives, most working women in nineteenth-century New England did not, according to Thomas Dublin. Sketching engaging portraits of women's experience in cottage industries, factories, domestic service, and village schools, Dublin demonstrates that the autonomy of working women actually diminished as growing numbers lived with their families and contributed their earnings to the household. From diaries, letters, account books, and censuses, Dublin reconstructs employment patterns across the century as he shows how wage work increasingly came to serve the needs of families, rather than of individual women. He first examines the case of rural women engaged in the cottage industries of weaving and palm-leaf hatmaking between 1820 and 1850. Next, he compares the employment experiences of women in the textile mills of Lowell and the shoe factories of Lynn. Following a discussion of Boston working women in the middle decades of the century-particularly domestic servants and garment workers-Dublin turns his attention to the lives of women teachers in three New Hampshire towns.
Download or read book United States History written by James Warren Oberly and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Louis D Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition 1900 1932 written by Gerald Berk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-22 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an innovative interpretation of industrialization and statebuilding in the U.S. by tracing the development of regulated competition. Conceptualized by Brandeis and implemented by trade associations and the Federal Trade Commission, regulated competition checked economic power by channeling competition from predation into improvement in products and production processes.
Download or read book The Roots of American Industrialization written by David R. Meyer and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-05-21 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Farms that were on poor soil and distant from markets declined, whereas other farms successfully adjusted production as rural and urban markets expanded and as Midwestern agricultural products flowed eastward after 1840. Rural and urban demand for manufactures in the East supported diverse industrial development and prosperous rural areas and burgeoning cities supplied increasing amounts of capital for investment.
Download or read book The Early Republic and Antebellum America written by Christopher G. Bates and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-08 with total page 1453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2015. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.
Download or read book Early American Technology written by Judith A. McGaw and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1994 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays documents technology's centrality to the history of early America. Unlike much previous scholarship, this volume emphasizes the quotidian rather than the exceptional: the farm household seeking to preserve food or acquir
Download or read book Through Ordinary Eyes written by Rufus Robbins and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2005-05-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extensive two-way exchange of letters between Rufus Robbins and members of his family provides a highly personalized view of the life of a Union soldier as well as life on the home front in South Abington, Massachusetts. Having enlisted in the Seventh Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment at the seasoned age of thirty-one, Rufus carefully crafted letters that are articulate, graphic, often witty, and that contribute much to our understanding of the daily course of the war. Notes from home reflect the Robbins family?s ever-present worry and concern for Rufus?s well-being. His brothers detail their involvement in the sewing of army boots, an activity for which South Abington held a large contract. In this collection, readers interested in military affairs can learn about the economic workings of the camps, the recreational outlets for the soldiers, and the grim realities of the Peninsula Campaign, while scholars focusing on civilian life will gain a greater understanding of the war's impact on the families and friends left behind.
Download or read book Modelwork written by Martin Brückner and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How making models allows us to recall what was and to discover what still might be Whether looking inward to the intricacies of human anatomy or outward to the furthest recesses of the universe, expanding the boundaries of human inquiry depends to a surprisingly large degree on the making of models. In this wide-ranging volume, scholars from diverse fields examine the interrelationships between a model’s material foundations and the otherwise invisible things it gestures toward, underscoring the pivotal role of models in understanding and shaping the world around us. Whether in the form of reproductions, interpretive processes, or constitutive tools, models may bridge the gap between the tangible and the abstract. By focusing on the material aspects of models, including the digital ones that would seem to displace their analogue forebears, these insightful essays ground modeling as a tactile and emphatically humanistic endeavor. With contributions from scholars in the history of science and technology, visual studies, musicology, literary studies, and material culture, this book demonstrates that models serve as invaluable tools across every field of cultural development, both historically and in the present day. Modelwork is unique in calling attention to modeling’s duality, a dynamic exchange between imagination and matter. This singular publication shows us how models shape our ability to ascertain the surrounding world and to find new ways to transform it. Contributors: Hilary Bryon, Virginia Tech; Johanna Drucker, UCLA; Seher Erdoğan Ford, Temple U; Peter Galison, Harvard U; Lisa Gitelman, New York U; Reed Gochberg, Harvard U; Catherine Newman Howe, Williams College; Christopher J. Lukasik, Purdue U; Martin Scherzinger, New York U; Juliet S. Sperling, U of Washington; Annabel Jane Wharton, Duke U.
Download or read book International Bibliography of Business History written by Francis Goodall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 685 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of business history has changed and grown dramatically over the last few years. There is less interest in the traditional `company-centred' approach and more concern about the wider business context. With the growth of multi-national corporations in the 1980s, international and inter-firm comparisons have gained in importance. In addition, there has been a move towards improving links with mainstream economic, financial and social history through techniques and outlook. The International Bibliography of Business History brings all of the strands together and provides the user with a comprehensive guide to the literature in the field. The Bibliography is a unique volume which covers the depth and breadth of research in business history. This exhaustive volume has been compiled by a team of subject specialists from around the world under the editorship of three prestigious business historians.
Download or read book An Economic History of the United States written by Ronald Seavoy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Economic History of the United States is an accessible and informative survey designed for undergraduate courses on American economic history. The book spans from 1607 to the modern age and presents a documented history of how the American economy has propelled the nation into a position of world leadership. Noted economic historian Ronald E. Seavoy covers nearly 400 years of economic history, beginning with the commercialization of agriculture in the pre-colonial era, through the development of banks and industrialization in the nineteenth century, up to the globalization of the business economy in the present day.
Download or read book American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War written by Robert E. Gallman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This benchmark volume addresses the debate over the effects of early industrialization on standards of living during the decades before the Civil War. Its contributors demonstrate that the aggregate antebellum economy was growing faster than any other large economy had grown before. Despite the dramatic economic growth and rise in income levels, questions remain as to the general quality of life during this era. Was the improvement in income widely shared? How did economic growth affect the nature of work? Did higher levels of income lead to improved health and longevity? The authors address these questions by analyzing new estimates of labor force participation, real wages, and productivity, as well as of the distribution of income, height, and nutrition.
Download or read book The Business of Civil War written by Mark R. Wilson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2006-07-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging, original account of the politics and economics of the giant military supply project in the North reconstructs an important but little-known part of Civil War history. Drawing on new and extensive research in army and business archives, Mark R. Wilson offers a fresh view of the wartime North and the ways in which its economy worked when the Lincoln administration, with unprecedented military effort, moved to suppress the rebellion. This task of equipping and sustaining Union forces fell to career army procurement officers. Largely free from political partisanship or any formal free-market ideology, they created a mixed military economy with a complex contracting system that they pieced together to meet the experience of civil war. Wilson argues that the North owed its victory to these professional military men and their finely tuned relationships with contractors, public officials, and war workers. Wilson also examines the obstacles military bureaucrats faced, many of which illuminated basic problems of modern political economy: the balance between efficiency and equity, the promotion of competition, and the protection of workers' welfare. The struggle over these problems determined the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars; it also redirected American political and economic development by forcing citizens to grapple with difficult questions about the proper relationships among government, business, and labor. Students of the American Civil War will welcome this fresh study of military-industrial production and procurement on the home front—long an obscure topic.
Download or read book Invented by Law written by Christopher Beauchamp and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Beauchamp debunks the myth of Alexander Graham Bell as the telephone’s sole inventor, exposing that story’s origins in the arguments advanced by Bell’s lawyers during fiercely contested battles for patent monopoly. The courts anointed Bell father of the telephone—likely the most consequential intellectual property right ever granted.
Download or read book Technology in America written by Alan I. Marcus and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in a thoroughly updated new edition, this successful textbook surveys the history of technology in America from the 1600s to the 21st century. Alan I Marcus and Howard P. Segal explore the effect society, culture, politics and economics have had upon technological advances, and place the evolution of American technology within the broader context of the development of systems such as transportation and communications. This unique book connects phenomena such as colonial printing presses with the American Revolution; early photographs with the creation of an allegedly unique American character; and high-tech advances in biotechnology with a growing desire for individual autonomy. This is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of the history of technology, the history of science, and American history.
Download or read book The Republic for Which It Stands written by Richard White and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-04 with total page 964 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America. At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogenous citizenry, both black and white. The South and West were to be reconstructed in the image of the North. Thirty years later Americans occupied an unimagined world. The unity that the Civil War supposedly secured had proved ephemeral. The country was larger, richer, and more extensive, but also more diverse. Life spans were shorter, and physical well-being had diminished, due to disease and hazardous working conditions. Independent producers had become wage earners. The country was Catholic and Jewish as well as Protestant, and increasingly urban and industrial. The "dangerous" classes of the very rich and poor expanded, and deep differences -- ethnic, racial, religious, economic, and political -- divided society. The corruption that gave the Gilded Age its name was pervasive. These challenges also brought vigorous efforts to secure economic, moral, and cultural reforms. Real change -- technological, cultural, and political -- proliferated from below more than emerging from political leadership. Americans, mining their own traditions and borrowing ideas, produced creative possibilities for overcoming the crises that threatened their country. In a work as dramatic and colorful as the era it covers, White narrates the conflicts and paradoxes of these decades of disorienting change and mounting unrest, out of which emerged a modern nation whose characteristics resonate with the present day.
