Download or read book Behemoth A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World written by Joshua B. Freeman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Freeman’s rich and ambitious Behemoth depicts a world in retreat that still looms large in the national imagination.…More than an economic history, or a chronicle of architectural feats and labor movements." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times In an accessible and timely work of scholarship, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares of industrialization and social change. He whisks readers from the early textile mills that powered the Industrial Revolution to the factory towns of New England to today’s behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones in China and Vietnam. Behemoth offers a piercing perspective on how factories have shaped our societies and the challenges we face now.
Download or read book Behemoth written by Joshua B. Freeman and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Freeman’s rich and ambitious Behemoth depicts a world in retreat that still looms large in the national imagination.…More than an economic history, or a chronicle of architectural feats and labor movements." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times In an accessible and timely work of scholarship, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares of industrialization and social change. He whisks readers from the early textile mills that powered the Industrial Revolution to the factory towns of New England to today’s behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones in China and Vietnam. Behemoth offers a piercing perspective on how factories have shaped our societies and the challenges we face now.
Download or read book Behemoth written by Joshua B. Freeman and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping, global history of the rise of the factory and its effects on society. We live in a factory-made world: modern life is built on three centuries of advances in factory production, efficiency, and technology. But giant factories have also fueled our fears about the future since their beginnings, when William Blake called them "dark Satanic mills." Many factories that operated over the last two centuries—such as Homestead, River Rouge, and Foxconn—were known for the labor exploitation and class warfare they engendered, not to mention the environmental devastation caused by factory production from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution up to today. In a major work of scholarship that is also wonderfully accessible, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares of industrialization and social change. He whisks readers from the textile mills in England that powered the Industrial Revolution and the factory towns of New England to the colossal steel and car plants of twentieth-century America, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union and on to today’s behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones in China and Vietnam. The giant factory, Freeman shows, led a revolution that transformed human life and the environment. He traces arguments about factories and social progress through such critics and champions as Marx and Engels, Charles Dickens, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Ford, and Joseph Stalin. He chronicles protests against standard industry practices from unions and workers’ rights groups that led to shortened workdays, child labor laws, protection for organized labor, and much more. In Behemoth, Freeman also explores how factories became objects of great wonder that both inspired and horrified artists and writers in their time. He examines representations of factories in the work of Charles Sheeler, Margaret Bourke-White, Charlie Chaplin, Diego Rivera, and Edward Burtynsky. Behemoth tells the grand story of global industry from the Industrial Revolution to the present. It is a magisterial work on factories and the people whose labor made them run. And it offers a piercing perspective on how factories have shaped our societies and the challenges we face now.
Download or read book Working Class New York written by Joshua B. Freeman and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “lucid, detailed, and imaginative analysis” (The Nation) of the model city that working-class New Yorkers created after World War II—and its tragic demise More than any other city in America, New York in the years after the Second World War carved out an idealistic and equitable path to the future. Largely through the efforts of its working class and the dynamic labor movement it built, New York City became the envied model of liberal America and the scourge of conservatives everywhere: cheap and easy-to-use mass transit, work in small businesses and factories that had good wages and benefits, affordable public housing, and healthcare for all. Working-Class New York is an “engrossing” (Dissent) account of the birth of that ideal and the way it came crashing down. In what Publishers Weekly calls “absorbing and beautifully detailed history,” historian Joshua Freeman shows how the anticommunist purges of the 1950s decimated the ranks of the labor movement and demoralized its idealists, and how the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s dealt another crushing blow to liberal ideals as the city’s wealthy elite made a frenzied grab for power. A grand work of cultural and social history, Working-Class New York is a moving chronicle of a dream that died but may yet rise again.
Download or read book City of Workers City of Struggle written by Joshua B. Freeman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the founding of New Amsterdam until today, working people have helped create and re-create the City of New York through their struggles. Starting with artisans and slaves in colonial New York and ranging all the way to twenty-first-century gig-economy workers, this book tells the story of New York’s labor history anew. City of Workers, City of Struggle brings together essays by leading historians of New York and a wealth of illustrations, offering rich descriptions of work, daily life, and political struggle. It recounts how workers have developed formal and informal groups not only to advance their own interests but also to pursue a vision of what the city should be like and whom it should be for. The book goes beyond the largely white, male wage workers in mainstream labor organizations who have dominated the history of labor movements to look at enslaved people, indentured servants, domestic workers, sex workers, day laborers, and others who have had to fight not only their masters and employers but also labor groups that often excluded them. Through their stories—how they fought for inclusion or developed their own ways to advance—it recenters labor history for contemporary struggles. City of Workers, City of Struggle offers the definitive account of the four-hundred-year history of efforts by New York workers to improve their lives and their communities. In association with the exhibition City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York at the Museum of the City of New York
Download or read book The Industrial Revolution in World History written by Peter N Stearns and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The industrial revolution was the single most important development in human history over the past three centuries, and it continues to shape the contemporary world. With new methods and organizations for producing goods, industrialization altered where people live, how they play, and even how they define political issues. By exploring the ways the industrial revolution reshaped world history, this book offers a unique look into the international factors that started the industrial revolution and its global spread and impact. In the fourth edition, noted historian Peter N. Stearns continues his global analysis of the industrial revolution with new discussions of industrialization outside of the West, including the study of India, the Middle East, and China. In addition, an expanded conclusion contains an examination of the changing contexts of industrialization. The Industrial Revolution in World History is essential for students of world history and economics, as well as for those seeking to know more about the global implications of what is arguably the defining socioeconomic event of modern times.
Download or read book Labor s End written by Jason Resnikoff and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Labor's End traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. As Jason Resnikoff shows, the term automation expressed the conviction that industrial progress meant the inevitable abolition of manual labor from industry. But the real substance of the term reflected industry's desire to hide an intensification of human work--and labor's loss of power and protection--behind magnificent machinery and a starry-eyed faith in technological revolution. The rhetorical power of the automation ideology revealed and perpetuated a belief that the idea of freedom was incompatible with the activity of work. From there, political actors ruled out the workplace as a site of politics while some of labor's staunchest allies dismissed sped-up tasks, expanded workloads, and incipient deindustrialization in the name of technological progress. A forceful intellectual history, Labor's End challenges entrenched assumptions about automation's transformation of the American workplace.
Download or read book Embracing Defeat written by John W Dower and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000-07-04 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of modern Japan traces the impact of defeat and reconstruction on every aspect of Japan's national life. It examines the economic resurgence as well as how the nation as a whole reacted to defeat and the end of a suicidal nationalism.
Download or read book A Call to Arms written by Maury Klein and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-07-16 with total page 916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The colossal scale of World War II required a mobilization effort greater than anything attempted in all of the world's history. The United States had to fight a war across two oceans and three continents--and to do so, it had to build and equip a military that was all but nonexistent before the war began. Never in the nation's history did it have to create, outfit, transport, and supply huge armies, navies, and air forces on so many distant and disparate fronts. The Axis powers might have fielded better-trained soldiers, better weapons, and better tanks and aircraft, but they could not match American productivity. The United States buried its enemies in aircraft, ships, tanks, and guns; in this sense, American industry and American workers, won World War II. The scale of the effort was titanic, and the result historic. Not only did it determine the outcome of the war, but it transformed the American economy and society. Maury Klein's A Call to Arms is the definitive narrative history of this epic struggle--told by one of America's greatest historians of business and economics--and renders the transformation of America with a depth and vividness never available before.
Download or read book Facing the Monster written by Carol Hart Metzker and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2012-06 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invisible, growing monster roams the streets, preying on millions of innocent victims in the United States and overseas. This monster is child slavery, and it is woven into the very fabric of our daily lives. Because it touches every aspect of our lives, however, it can be addressed and solved. In Facing the Monster, author Carol Hart Metzker calls attention to the plight of t he world's children who live a life of modern slaver y. She tells how an unexpected encounter with a n eleven-year-old girl led her into the dark world of human trafficking, forced sex trade, and child slavery. Metzker's quest to find hope, to help end slavery, and to aid survivors took her as far as children's shelters in remote villages in India and as close as a special home just miles from her front door in Pennsylvania. Facing the Monster narrates the stories of rescued child slaves and paints a poignant picture of the plight of hidden victims worldwide. Metzker's inspiring chronicle reveals the monstrous truths about child slavery, provides an action plan to become an agent of change, and presents solutions to end it. It shows how one person's actions can change the lives of many and that everyone can take a step to fight child slavery.
Download or read book Forging Global Fordism written by Stefan J. Link and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new global history of Fordism from the Great Depression to the postwar era As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. Forging Global Fordism traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. This incisive book recovers the crucial role of activist states in global industrial transformations and reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order. Stefan Link uncovers the forgotten origins of Fordism in Midwestern populism, and shows how Henry Ford's antiliberal vision of society appealed to both the Soviet and Nazi regimes. He explores how they positioned themselves as America's antagonists in reaction to growing American hegemony and seismic shifts in the global economy during the interwar years, and shows how Detroit visitors like William Werner, Ferdinand Porsche, and Stepan Dybets helped spread versions of Fordism abroad and mobilize them in total war. Forging Global Fordism challenges the notion that global mass production was a product of post–World War II liberal internationalism, demonstrating how it first began in the global thirties, and how the spread of Fordism had a distinctly illiberal trajectory.
Download or read book The Innovation Complex written by Sharon Zukin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York is rapidly changing in response to a new economy, but startups, tech workers, and venture capital are not visible unless you know where to look for them--in old industrial neighborhoods, on the waterfront, and at events like hackathons and meetups. In The Innovation Complex, Sharon Zukin shows the people and places that shape the urban tech economy, making cities more successful for businesses yet in some ways less livable.
Download or read book Temp written by Louis Hyman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the William G. Bowen Prize Named a "Triumph" of 2018 by New York Times Book Critics Shortlisted for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award The untold history of the surprising origins of the "gig economy"--how deliberate decisions made by consultants and CEOs in the 50s and 60s upended the stability of the workplace and the lives of millions of working men and women in postwar America. Over the last fifty years, job security has cratered as the institutions that insulated us from volatility have been swept aside by a fervent belief in the market. Now every working person in America today asks the same question: how secure is my job? In Temp, Louis Hyman explains how we got to this precarious position and traces the real origins of the gig economy: it was created not by accident, but by choice through a series of deliberate decisions by consultants and CEOs--long before the digital revolution. Uber is not the cause of insecurity and inequality in our country, and neither is the rest of the gig economy. The answer to our growing problems goes deeper than apps, further back than outsourcing and downsizing, and contests the most essential assumptions we have about how our businesses should work. As we make choices about the future, we need to understand our past.
Download or read book Out Of Control written by Kevin Kelly and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.
Download or read book Dying for an iPhone written by Jenny Chan and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suicides, excessive overtime, and hostility and violence on the factory floor in China. Drawing on vivid testimonies from rural migrant workers, student interns, managers and trade union staff, Dying for an iPhone is a devastating expose of two of the world’s most powerful companies: Foxconn and Apple. As the leading manufacturer of iPhones, iPads, and Kindles, and employing one million workers in China alone, Taiwanese-invested Foxconn’s drive to dominate global electronics manufacturing has aligned perfectly with China’s goal of becoming the world leader in technology. This book reveals the human cost of that ambition and what our demands for the newest and best technology means for workers. Foxconn workers have repeatedly demonstrated their power to strike at key nodes of transnational production, challenge management and the Chinese state, and confront global tech behemoths. Dying for an iPhone allows us to assess the impact of global capitalism’s deepening crisis on workers.’
Download or read book The Second Machine Age Work Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies written by Erik Brynjolfsson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-01-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The big stories -- The skills of the new machines : technology races ahead -- Moore's law and the second half of the chessboard -- The digitization of just about everything -- Innovation : declining or recombining? -- Artificial and human intelligence in the second machine age -- Computing bounty -- Beyond GDP -- The spread -- The biggest winners : stars and superstars -- Implications of the bounty and the spread -- Learning to race with machines : recommendations for individuals -- Policy recommendations -- Long-term recommendations -- Technology and the future (which is very different from "technology is the future").
Download or read book Factory Man written by Beth Macy and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestseller about one man's battle to save hundreds of jobs by demonstrating the greatness of American business. The Bassett Furniture Company was once the world's biggest wood furniture manufacturer. Run by the same powerful Virginia family for generations, it was also the center of life in Bassett, Virginia. But beginning in the 1980s, the first waves of Asian competition hit, and ultimately Bassett was forced to send its production overseas. One man fought back: John Bassett III, a shrewd and determined third-generation factory man, now chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co, which employs more than 700 Virginians and has sales of more than $90 million. In Factory Man, Beth Macy brings to life Bassett's deeply personal furniture and family story, along with a host of characters from an industry that was as cutthroat as it was colorful. As she shows how he uses legal maneuvers, factory efficiencies, and sheer grit and cunning to save hundreds of jobs, she also reveals the truth about modern industry in America.
