Stacks of stone preside over many bucolic and wooded landscapes in the mid-Atlantic states. Initially constructed more than two hundred years ago, they housed blast furnaces that converted rock and wood into the iron that enabled the United States to secure its national independence. By the eve of the Revolutionary War, furnaces and forges in the American colonies turned out one-seventh of the world's iron.Forging America illuminates the fate of labor in an era when industry, manhood, and independence began to take on new and highly charged meanings. John Bezís-Selfa argues that the iron industry, with its early concentrations of capital and labor, reveals the close links between industrial and political revolution. Through means ranging from religious exhortation to force, ironmasters encouraged or compelled workers—free, indentured, and enslaved—to adopt new work styles and standards of personal industry. Eighteenth-century revolutionary rhetoric hastened the demise of indentured servitude, however, and national independence reinforced the legal status of slavery and increasingly defined manual labor as "dependent" and racially coded. Bezís-Selfa highlights the importance of slave labor to early American industrial development. Research in documents from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries led Bezís-Selfa to accounts of the labor of African-Americans, indentured servants, new immigrants, and others. Their stories inform his highly readable narrative of more than two hundred years of American history.

Written just after the passing of the 1924 Immigration Act, this book by one of America's most prominent racial thinkers is an in-depth analysis of the racial developments which led to the American Revolution, the Civil War and the mass immigration of the late nineteenth century which disrupted the until-then almost entirely North-Western European colonization of North America. Delighted that the 1924 law effectively stopped all further mass migration, Stoddard devoted the rest of this work to discussing solutions to what he called the existing "racial dilemmas" facing America, namely the threat of illegal Mexican immigration, the growth in black numbers and unassimilable European immigrants. Although the 1924 act was repealed in the 1960s, this book contains many observations on race and the implications of mass migration which are more applicable than ever before. Contents Preface I. The Foundations Of Old America II. The Beginning Of National Life III. The First Forging Of America IV. The Schism Of The Civil War V. The Shattering Of Old America VI. The Alien Flood VII. On The Road To Ruin VIII. The Great Awakening IX. The Closing Of The Gates X. The Will To National Unity XI. The Dilemma Of Color XII. Bi-Racialism: The Key To Social Peace XIII. The Scope Of The Task Before Us XIV. Re-Forging America Index

Written just after the passing of the 1924 Immigration Act, this book by one of America's most prominent racial thinkers is an in-depth analysis of the racial developments which led to the American Revolution, the Civil War and the mass immigration of the late nineteenth century which disrupted the until-then almost entirely North-Western European colonization of North America. Delighted that the 1924 law effectively stopped all further mass migration, Stoddard devoted the rest of this work to discussing solutions to what he called the existing "racial dilemmas" facing America, namely the threat of illegal Mexican immigration, the growth in black numbers and unassimilable European immigrants. "We want above all things to preserve America. But 'America,' as we have already seen, is not a mere geographical expression; it is a nation, whose foundations were laid over three hundred years ago by Anglo-Saxon Nordics, and whose nationhood is due almost exclusively to people of North European stock-not only the old colonists and their descendants but also many millions of North Europeans who have entered the country since colonial times and who have for the most part been thoroughly assimilated. Despite the recent influx of alien elements, therefore, the American people is still predominantly a blend of closely related North European strains, and the fabric of American life is fundamentally their creation." Although the 1924 act was repealed in the 1960s, this book contains many observations on race and the implications of mass migration which are more applicable than ever before. Contents Preface I. The Foundations Of Old America II. The Beginning Of National Life III. The First Forging Of America IV. The Schism Of The Civil War V. The Shattering Of Old America VI. The Alien Flood VII. On The Road To Ruin VIII. The Great Awakening IX. The Closing Of The Gates X. The Will To National Unity XI. The Dilemma Of Color XII. Bi-Racialism: The Key To Social Peace XIII. The Scope Of The Task Before Us XIV. Re-Forging America Index

At the beginning of the twentieth century, industrialization both dramatically altered everyday experiences and shaped debates about the effects of immigration, empire, and urbanization. In American Abyss, Daniel E. Bender examines an array of sources—eugenics theories, scientific studies of climate, socialist theory, and even popular novels about cavemen—to show how intellectuals and activists came to understand industrialization in racial and gendered terms as the product of evolution and as the highest expression of civilization.Their discussions, he notes, are echoed today by the use of such terms as the "developed" and "developing" worlds. American industry was contrasted with the supposed savagery and primitivism discovered in tropical colonies, but observers who made those claims worried that industrialization, by encouraging immigration, child and women's labor, and large families, was reversing natural selection. Factories appeared to favor the most unfit. There was a disturbing tendency for such expressions of fear to favor eugenicist "remedies."Bender delves deeply into the culture and politics of the age of industry. Linking urban slum tourism and imperial science with immigrant better-baby contests and hoboes, American Abyss uncovers the complex interactions of turn-of-the-century ideas about race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Moreover, at a time when immigration again lies at the center of American economy and society, this book offers an alarming and pointed historical perspective on contemporary fears of immigrant laborers.

American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930 examines the dynamic interactions between social and literary fields during the so-called Jazz Age. It situates the era's place in the incremental evolution of American literature throughout the twentieth century. Essays from preeminent critics and historians analyze many overlapping aspects of American letters in the 1920s and re-evaluate an astonishingly diverse group of authors. Expansive in scope and daring in its mixture of eclectic methods, this book extends the most exciting advances made in the last several decades in the fields of modernist studies, ethnic literatures, African-American literature, gender studies, transnational studies, and the history of the book. It examines how the world of literature intersected with other arts, such as cinema, jazz, and theater, and explores the print culture in transition, with a focus on new publishing houses, trends in advertising, readership, and obscenity laws.

A disturbing but ultimately discredited strain in American thought, eugenics was a crucial ideological force in the early twentieth century. Luczak investigates the work of writers like Jack London and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to consider the impact of eugenic racial discourse on American literary production from 1900-1940.