This book documents the growth of industrial technology in these "little hamlets," covering the social, labor, economic, and technical aspects of this fascinating chapter in the development of American enterprise.

This book documents the growth of industrial technology in these "little hamlets," covering the social, labor, economic, and technical aspects of this fascinating chapter in the development of American enterprise.

The church steeple was one of the first art forms to be cultivated in this new land, becoming one of early Americas principal artistic achievements. The backstory of this distinctive art form is a fascinating one. The "Yankees," a homogenous group emerged in New England in the early 18th century. Their artistic abilities in design are also prevalent in silverwork and furniture craft, however it was in their steeples that they excelled and in which they were best expressed. In The Steeples of Old New England, Kirk Shivell traces both the history of these steeples and the Yankee society that built them, including many examples and anecdotes, covering the period between 1701 through 1860. This book provides a wealth of information students of history, architecture, and religion, or anyone else interested in reading about or visiting these historical landmarks. These magnificent edifices rose up everywhere on the newly settled New England landscape; the earliest built only a half-century before the American Revolution, and the last, built right before the Civil War. There are over 115 exquisitely beautiful illustrations, some full color, and others taken from documents of the period. A comprehensive directory and bibliography are also included.

A master storyteller presents a riveting drama of America's first "crime of the century"--from murder investigation to a church sex scandal to celebrity trial--and its aftermath. In December 1832 a farmer found the body of a young, pregnant woman hanging near a haystack outside a New England mill town. When news spread that Methodist preacher Ephraim Avery was accused of murdering Sarah Maria Cornell, a factory worker, the case gave the public everything they found irresistible: sexually charged violence, adultery, the hypocrisy of a church leader, secrecy and mystery, and suspicions of insanity. Murder in a Mill Town tells the story of how a local crime quickly turned into a national scandal that became America's first "trial of the century." After her death--after she became the country's most notorious "factory girl"--Cornell's choices about work, survival, and personal freedom became enmeshed in stories that Americans told themselves about their new world of industry and women's labor and the power of religion in the early republic. Writers penned seduction tales, true-crime narratives, detective stories, political screeds, songs, poems, and melodramatic plays about the lurid scandal. As trial witnesses, ordinary people gave testimony that revealed rapidly changing times. As the controversy of Cornell's murder spread beyond the courtroom, the public eagerly devoured narratives of moral deviance, abortion, suicide, mobs, "fake news," and conspiracy politics. Long after the jury's verdict, the nation refused to let the scandal go. A meticulously reconstructed historical whodunit, Murder in a Mill Town exposes the troublesome workings of criminal justice in the young democracy and the rise of a sensational popular culture.

This innovative and absorbing book surveys a little known chapter in the story of American urbanism—the history of communities built and owned by single companies seeking to bring their workers’ homes and place of employment together on a single site. By 1930 more than two million people lived in such towns, dotted across an industrial frontier which stretched from Lowell, Massachusetts, through Torrance, California to Norris, Tennessee. Margaret Crawford focuses on the transformation of company town construction from the vernacular settlements of the late eighteenth century to the professional designs of architects and planners one hundred and fifty years later. Eschewing a static architectural approach which reads politics, history, and economics through the appearance of buildings, Crawford portrays the successive forms of company towns as the product of a dynamic process, shaped by industrial transformation, class struggle, and reformers’ efforts to control and direct these forces.

Examines how towns across the United States have grown thanks to the existence of one large business being run from the community, discusses how those single-business communities have influenced the American economy, and explores the benefits and consequences of these towns.

Built by industrialists whose early businesses contributed to the escalation of the Industrial Revolution, company towns flourished in countries that embraced capitalism and open-market trading. In many instances, the company town came to symbolize the wrecking of the environment, especially in places associated with extractive industries such as mining and lumber milling. Some resident industrialists, however, took a genuine interest in the welfare of their work forces, and in a number of instances hired architects to provide a model environment. Overtaken by time, these towns were either abandoned or caught up in suburban growth. The most thorough-going and only international assessment of the company town, this collection of essays by specialists and authorities of each region offers a balanced account of architectural and social history and provides a better understanding of the architectural and urban experiences of the early industrial age.

Agrarian Landscapes in Transition researches human interaction with the earth. With hundreds of acres of agricultural land going out of production every day, the introduction, spread, and abandonment of agriculture represents the most pervasive alteration of the Earth's environment for several thousand years. What happens when humans impose their spatial and temporal signatures on ecological regimes, and how does this manipulation affect the earth and nature's desire for equilibrium? Studies were conducted at six Long Term Ecological Research sites within the US, including New England, the Appalachian Mountains, Colorado, Michigan, Kansas, and Arizona. While each site has its own unique agricultural history, patterns emerge that help make sense of how our actions have affected the earth, and how the earth pushes back. The book addresses how human activities influence the spatial and temporal structures of agrarian landscapes, and how this varies over time and across biogeographic regions. It also looks at the ecological and environmental consequences of the resulting structural changes, the human responses to these changes, and how these responses drive further changes in agrarian landscapes. The time frames studied include the ecology of the earth before human interaction, pre-European human interaction during the rise and fall of agricultural land use, and finally the biological and cultural response to the abandonment of farming, due to complete abandonment or a land-use change such as urbanization.

While historians have given ample attention to stories of entrepreneurship, invention, and labor conflict, they have told us little about actual work-places and how people worked. Workers seldom wrote about their daily employment. However, they did leave behind their tools, products, shops, and factories as well as the surrounding industrial landscapes and communities. In this book, Gordon and Malone look at the industrialization of North America from the perspective of the industrial archaeologist. Using material evidence from such varied sites as Indian steatite quarries, automobile plants, and coal mines, they examine manufacturing technology, transportation systems, and the effects of industrialization on the land. Their research greatly expands our understanding of industry and focuses attention on the contributions of anonymous artisans whose skills shaped our industrial heritage.

Ingenious Machinists recounts the early development of industrialization in New England and New York through the lives of two prominent innovators whose work advanced the transformation to factory work and corporations, the rise of the middle class, and other momentous changes in nineteenth-century America. Paul Moody chose a secure path as a corporate engineer in the Waltham-Lowell system that both rewarded and constrained his career. David Wilkinson was a risk-taking entrepreneur from Rhode Island who went bankrupt and relocated to Cohoes, New York, where he was instrumental in that city's early industrial development. Anthony J. Connors writes not just a history of technological innovation and business development, but also two interwoven stories about these inventors. He shows the textile industry not in its decline, but in its days of great social and economic promise. It is a story of the social consequences of new technology and the risks and rewards of the exhilarating, but unsettling, early years of industrial capitalism.