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Author: Anthony Wallace Publisher: Knopf ISBN: 0307826104 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 780
Book Description
Located near the southern edge of the Pennsylvania anthracite, the town of St. Clair in the early half of the 19th century seemed to be perfectly situated to provide fuel to the iron and steel industry that was the heart of the Industrial Revolution in America. It was a time of unprecedented promise and possibility for the region, and yet, in the years between 1830 and 1880, only grandiose illusions flourished there. St. Clair itself succumbed early on to a devastating economic blight, one that would in time affect anthracite mining everywhere. In this dramatic work of social history, Anthony F. C. Wallace re-creates St. Clair in those years when expectations collided with reality, when the coal trade was in chronic distress, exacerbated by the epic battles between the forces of labor and capital. As he did in his Bancroft Prize-winning Rockdale, Wallace uses public records and private papers to reconstruct the operation of an anthracite colliery and the life of a working-man’s town totally dependent upon it. He describes the labor hierarchy of the collieries, the communal spirit that sprang up in the outlying mine patches, the polyglot immigrant life in the taverns and churchs, and the workingmen’s societies that provided identity to the miners and gave relief to families in distress. He examines the birth of the first effective miners’ union and documents the escalating antagonism between Irish immigrant workers—mostly Catholic—and the Protestant middle classes who owned the collieries. Wallace reveals the blindness, greed, and self-congratulation of the mine owners and operators. These “heroes” of the entrepreneurial wars disregarded geologists’ warnings that the coal seams south of St. Clair were virtually inaccessible and, at best, extremely costly to mine, and then blamed their economic woes on the lack of a high tariff on imported British iron. To cut costs, they ignored the most basic and safety engineering practices and then blamed “the careless miner” and “Irish hooligans” for the catastrophic accidents that resulted. In thrall to a great dream of wealth and power, they plunged ahead to bankruptcy while the miners paid with their lives. St. Clair is a rich and illuminating work of scholarship—an engrossing portrait of a disaster-prone industry (a portrait that stands as a sober warning to the nuclear-power industry) and of the tragic hubris of a ruling class that brough ruin upon a Pennsylvania coal town at a crucial moment in its history.
Author: Anthony Wallace Publisher: Knopf ISBN: 0307826104 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 780
Book Description
Located near the southern edge of the Pennsylvania anthracite, the town of St. Clair in the early half of the 19th century seemed to be perfectly situated to provide fuel to the iron and steel industry that was the heart of the Industrial Revolution in America. It was a time of unprecedented promise and possibility for the region, and yet, in the years between 1830 and 1880, only grandiose illusions flourished there. St. Clair itself succumbed early on to a devastating economic blight, one that would in time affect anthracite mining everywhere. In this dramatic work of social history, Anthony F. C. Wallace re-creates St. Clair in those years when expectations collided with reality, when the coal trade was in chronic distress, exacerbated by the epic battles between the forces of labor and capital. As he did in his Bancroft Prize-winning Rockdale, Wallace uses public records and private papers to reconstruct the operation of an anthracite colliery and the life of a working-man’s town totally dependent upon it. He describes the labor hierarchy of the collieries, the communal spirit that sprang up in the outlying mine patches, the polyglot immigrant life in the taverns and churchs, and the workingmen’s societies that provided identity to the miners and gave relief to families in distress. He examines the birth of the first effective miners’ union and documents the escalating antagonism between Irish immigrant workers—mostly Catholic—and the Protestant middle classes who owned the collieries. Wallace reveals the blindness, greed, and self-congratulation of the mine owners and operators. These “heroes” of the entrepreneurial wars disregarded geologists’ warnings that the coal seams south of St. Clair were virtually inaccessible and, at best, extremely costly to mine, and then blamed their economic woes on the lack of a high tariff on imported British iron. To cut costs, they ignored the most basic and safety engineering practices and then blamed “the careless miner” and “Irish hooligans” for the catastrophic accidents that resulted. In thrall to a great dream of wealth and power, they plunged ahead to bankruptcy while the miners paid with their lives. St. Clair is a rich and illuminating work of scholarship—an engrossing portrait of a disaster-prone industry (a portrait that stands as a sober warning to the nuclear-power industry) and of the tragic hubris of a ruling class that brough ruin upon a Pennsylvania coal town at a crucial moment in its history.
Author: Paul Lucier Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421402858 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 444
Book Description
An “insightful” account of the early fossil fuel industry, the rise of the professional consultant, and the nexus between science and money (Technology and Culture). In this impressively researched, highly original work, Paul Lucier explains how science became an integral part of American technology and industry in the nineteenth century. Scientists and Swindlers introduces us to a new service of professionals: the consulting scientists. Lucier follows these entrepreneurial men of science on their wide-ranging commercial engagements from the shores of Nova Scotia to the coast of California and shows how their innovative work fueled the rapid growth of the American coal and oil industries and the rise of American geology and chemistry. Along the way, he explores the decisive battles over expertise and authority, the high-stakes court cases over patenting research, the intriguing and often humorous exploits of swindlers, and the profound ethical challenges of doing science for money. Starting with the small surveying businesses of the 1830s and reaching to the origins of applied science in the 1880s, Lucier recounts the complex and curious relations that evolved as geologists, chemists, capitalists, and politicians worked to establish scientific research as a legitimate, regularly compensated, and respected enterprise. This sweeping narrative enriches our understanding of how the rocks beneath our feet became invaluable resources for science, technology, and industry.
Author: Christopher C. Sellers Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807864455 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 350
Book Description
Hazards of the Job explores the roots of modern environmentalism in the early-twentieth-century United States. It was in the workplace of this era, argues Christopher Sellers, that our contemporary understanding of environmental health dangers first took shape. At the crossroads where medicine and science met business, labor, and the state, industrial hygiene became a crucible for molding midcentury notions of corporate interest and professional disinterest as well as environmental concepts of the 'normal' and the 'natural.' The evolution of industrial hygiene illuminates how powerfully battles over knowledge and objectivity could reverberate in American society: new ways of establishing cause and effect begat new predicaments in medicine, law, economics, politics, and ethics, even as they enhanced the potential for environmental control. From the 1910s through the 1930s, as Sellers shows, industrial hygiene investigators fashioned a professional culture that gained the confidence of corporations, unions, and a broader public. As the hygienists moved beyond the workplace, this microenvironment prefigured their understanding of the environment at large. Transforming themselves into linchpins of science-based production and modern consumerism, they also laid the groundwork for many controversies to come.
Author: Perry K. Blatz Publisher: SUNY Press ISBN: 9780791418192 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
Democratic Miners traces the history of work and labor relations in the anthracite coal industry, focusing on conditions that led up to, and followed, the famous strike of 1902. That strike, an epic five-and-a-half-month struggle, led the federal government to intervene in a labor dispute for the first time in American history. Focusing on the workplace, Blatz puts the 1902 strike in the context of a turbulent half-century of labor-management relations. Those years saw the unionization of the anthracite fields under the United Mine Workers of America, amidst an evolving democratic tradition of rank-and-file protest against corporate control, and ironically ended with a growing rift between miners and union leadership. Unlike many books on labor relations, this work concentrates especially on the workers themselves. Working-class as opposed to union history, it contributes greatly to our understanding of working-class formation in the Progressive years.
Author: K. Bradley Penuel Publisher: SAGE Publications ISBN: 1452266395 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 985
Book Description
This encyclopedia covers response to disasters around the world, from governments to NGOs, from charities to politics, from refugees to health, and from economics to international relations, covering issues in both historical and contemporary context. The volumes include information relevant to students of sociology, national security, economics, health sciences, political science, emergency preparedness, history, agriculture, and many other subjects. The goal is to help readers appreciate the importance of the effects, responsibilities, and ethics of disaster relief, and to initiate educational discussion brought forth by the specific cultural, scientific, and topical articles contained within the work. Including 425 signed entries in a two-volume set presented in A-to-Z format, and drawing contributors from varied academic disciplines, this encyclopedia also features a preface by Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton of the 9/11 Commission. This reference resource examines disaster response and relief in a manner that is authoritative yet accessible, jargon-free, and balanced to help readers better understand issues from varied perspectives. Key Themes - Geography - Government and International Agencies - History - Human-induced Disasters - Infrastructure - Local Response - Major Disasters (Relief Case Studies) - Medicine and Psychology - Methods and Practices - Mitigation - Natural Disasters (Overviews) - Politics and Funding - Preparedness - Recovery - Response - Science and Prediction - Sociology - U.S. Geographical Response
Author: Karen Bescherer Metheny Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press ISBN: 9781572334953 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
In From the Miners’ Doublehouse, archaeologist Karen Metheny uses an interpretive, contextual approach to examine the physical and cultural landscape of the now-abandoned coal-mining town of Helvetia in western Pennsylvania. The author weaves together documentary sources, oral history, and archaeological evidence to reveal the ways in which mine workers constructed a sense of community in this company town from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. As the first archaeological and historical study of a coal company town that focuses upon the strategies its residents used to manipulate landscape and material culture to achieve personal and social goals, From the Miners’ Doublehouse makes a significant contribution to historical and industrial archaeology. This book will be of interest to scholars in industrial and environmental history, geography, and industrial sociology. It will also appeal to general readers interested in coal’s history and the Appalachian coal-mining region.
Author: Edward A. Purcell Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0195073290 Category : Actions and defenses Languages : en Pages : 459
Book Description
Litigation and Inequality explores the dynamic and intricate relationship between legal and social change through the prism of litigation tactics and out-of-court settlement practices from the 1870s to the 1950s. Developing the synthetic historical concept of a "social litigation system", Purcell analyzes the role of both substansive and procedural law, as well as the impact of social and political factors in shaping the de facto processes of litigation and claims-disputing. Focusing on tort and insurance contract disputes between individuals and national corporations, he examines the changing social and economic significance of the choice between state and national courts that federal diversity jurisdiction gave litigants. Litigation and Inequality scrutinizes the increasingly sophisticated methods that parties developed to exploit their ability to choose between forums. It also traces the changing responses of the courts and legislatures to the escalation of tactical maneuvering. It locates the origins of modern litigation practice in the quarter century after 1910. Purcell points to fundamental flaws in the "efficiency" theory of tort law of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He identifies specific ways in which the legal system regularly subsidized corporate enterprise. He seriously qualifies and refines the progressive charge that the federal courts favored business interests. The book argues that during the period from the turn of the century to World War I - especially the critical period from 1905 to 1908 - the Supreme Court reoriented the federal judicial system and essentially created the twentieth century federal judiciary. It also challenges the idea thatdiversity jurisdiction is best understood as a device to protect nonresidents from local prejudice. It illuminates a range of related historical and legal issues, from the ostensible "formalism" of the late nineteenth century judicial thinking to the origins of the workmen's compensation movement. Examining these developments with clarity and insight, this work will interest historians and sociologists, as well as lawyers and legal scholars.
Author: Jessica van Horssen Publisher: UBC Press ISBN: 0774828447 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
For decades, manufacturers from around the world relied on asbestos to produce a multitude of fire-retardant products. As use of the mineral became more widespread, medical professionals discovered it had harmful effects on human health. Mining and manufacturing companies downplayed the risks to workers and the general public, but eventually, as the devastating nature of asbestos-related deaths became common knowledge, the industry suffered terminal decline. A Town Called Asbestos looks at how the people of Asbestos, Quebec, worked and lived alongside the largest chrysotile asbestos mine in the world. Dependent on this deadly industry for their community’s survival, they developed a unique, place-based understanding of their local environment; the risks they faced living next to the giant opencast mine; and their place within the global resource trade. This book unearths the local-global tensions that defined Asbestos’s proud history and reveals the challenges similar resource communities have faced – and continue to face today.
Author: Anthony Wallace
Author: Anthony Wallace
Author: Anthony F. C. Wallace
Author: Harold L. Platt
Author: Paul Lucier
Author: Christopher C. Sellers
Author: Perry K. Blatz
Author: K. Bradley Penuel
Author: Karen Bescherer Metheny
Author: Edward A. Purcell
Author: Jessica van Horssen