Economics of the American Lumber Industry PDF Download

Author: William G. Robbins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781585440252
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
For years the logging industry and the rich timberlands of the East and West coasts have evoked images of Jigger Jones and Paul Bunyan, lusty lumbermen of folk history. Behind these myths, however, lie the realities of ruthless competition, heedless exploitation of forestlands, and massive overproduction that once threatened to destroy the lumber industry. William G. Robbins reveals a sharply revisionist view of the lumber industry in the first half of the twentieth century, a period of drastic growth and change. He offers a unique national perspective on the dominant figures in logging--the large-scale plant, mill, and timberland owners whose decisions were shaped by profit seeking. It is a story of unbalanced production, economic gains and losses, the slow maturation of industrial capitalism, and the alarming toll in social and human costs. Modernizers in the industry developed trade associations as a means of controlling the widespread disorder. But these associations, dependent of voluntary and cooperative efforts, were relatively ineffective in the early years of the twentieth century. The fortunes of the lumber industry continued to fluctuate wildly until the Second World War, when lumbermen gained much of the legislative support they had sought so long from the federal government. This account will especially appeal to students of lumber and forest history as well as to historians, political scientists, and economists seeking a new approach to American political economy.

Author: William Powell Jones
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252029790
Category : African American men
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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The lumber industry employed more African American men than any southern economic sector outside agriculture, yet those workers have been almost completely ignored by scholars. Drawing on a substantial number of oral history interviews as well as on manuscript sources, local newspapers, and government documents, The Tribe of Black Ulysses explores black men and women's changing relationship to industrial work in three sawmill communities (Elizabethtown, South Carolina, Chapman, Alabama, and Bogalusa, Louisiana). By restoring black lumber workers to the history of southern industrialization, William P. Jones reveals that industrial employment was not incompatible - as previous historians have assumed - with the racial segregation and political disfranchisement that defined African American life in the Jim Crow South. At the same time, he complicates an older tradition of southern sociology that viewed industrialization as socially disruptive and morally corrupting to African American social and cultural traditions rooted in agriculture. William P. Jones is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Barrett, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Nelson Lichtenstein.

Author: Arye L. Hillman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1136455493
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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This book examines how trade policy is determined in democratic countries, and illustrates how protectionist policies are engendered by political processes that allow groups to pursue their own interests.

Author: James Willard Hurst
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1000

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Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Forests and forestry
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Author: Sue Fawn Chung
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252097556
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Though recognized for their work in the mining and railroad industries, the Chinese also played a critical role in the nineteenth-century lumber trade. Sue Fawn Chung continues her acclaimed examination of the impact of Chinese immigrants on the American West by bringing to life the tensions, towns, and lumber camps of the Sierra Nevada during a boom period of economic expansion. Chinese workers labored as woodcutters and flume-herders, lumberjacks and loggers. Exploding the myth of the Chinese as a docile and cheap labor army, Chung shows Chinese laborers earned wages similar to those of non-Asians. Men working as camp cooks, among other jobs, could make even more. At the same time, she draws on archives and archaeology to reconstruct everyday existence, offering evocative portraits of camp living, small town life, personal and work relationships, and the production and technical aspects of a dangerous trade. Chung also explores how Chinese used the legal system to win property and wage rights and how economic and technological change ultimately diminished Chinese participation in the lumber industry. Eye-opening and meticulous, Chinese in the Woods rewrites an important chapter in the history of labor and the American West.

Author: William Buckhout Greeley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Lumber
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Author: National Lumber Manufacturers Association
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Lumber trade
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Author: Robert E. Baldwin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226036510
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Interest in U.S. trade policy has been stimulated in recent years by the massive American trade deficit, by the belief that intervention by foreign governments in international markets has given other countries a competitive edge over the United States, and by concern about the increase in protectionism among industrial countries. In turn, major analytical developments in international economics have revolutionized trade theory, broadening its scope both by introducing in a more formal manner such concepts as imperfect competition, increasing returns, product differentiation, and learning effects and by including the study of political and economic factors that shape trade policy decisions. This collection of papers—the result of a conference held by the NBER—applies these "new" trade theories to existing world cases and also presents complementary empirical studies that are grounded in more traditional trade theories. The volume is divided into four parts. The papers in part 1 consider the problem of imperfect competition, empirically assessing the economic effect of various trade policies introduced in industries in which the "new" trade theory seems to apply. Those in part 2 isolate the effects of protection from the influences of the many economic changes that accompany actual periods of protection and also examine how the effects from exogenous changes in economic conditions vary with the form of protection. Part 3 provides new empirical evidence on the effect of foreign production by a country's firms on the home country's exports. Finally, in part 4, two key bilateral issues are analyzed: recent U.S.-Japanese trade tensions and the incident involving the threat of the imposition of countervailing duties by the United States on Canadian softwood lumber.

Author: Richard Harris
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226317684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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A unique study of how the American Dream came to be—and came to be constantly updated and renovated: ”A pleasure to read.”—American Historical Review Each year, North Americans spend as much money fixing up their homes as they do buying new ones. This obsession with improving our dwellings has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry that includes countless books, magazines, cable shows, and home improvement stores. Building a Market charts the rise of the home improvement industry in the United States and Canada from the end of World War I into the late 1950s. Drawing on the insights of business, social, and urban historians, and making use of a wide range of documentary sources, Richard Harris shows how the middle-class preference for home ownership first emerged in the 1920s—and how manufacturers, retailers, and the federal government combined to establish the massive home improvement market and a pervasive culture of Do-It-Yourself. Deeply insightful, Building a Market is the carefully crafted history of the emergence and evolution of a home improvement revolution that changed not just American culture but the American landscape as well. “An important topic that deserves to be widely read by scholars of business history, urban history, and social history.”—Journal of American History