Industrial History

In current debates about globalization, open and borderless elites are often set in opposition to the immobile and protectionist working classes. This view obscures a major historical fact: for around a century—from the 1860s to the 1970s—worker movements were at the cutting edge of internationalism. The creation in London of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 was a turning point. In this urgent, engaging work, historian Nicolas Delalande explores how international worker solidarity developed.

Dream Car tells the story of entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin’s fantastical 1970s-era Safety Vehicle-1 (SV1), audaciously launched during a tumultuous breakpoint in postwar history. The tale of the sexy-yet-safe SV1 reveals the influence of automobiles on ideas about the future, technology, entrepreneurship, risk, safety, showmanship, politics, sex, gender, business, and the state, as well as the history of the auto industry’s birth, decline, and rebirth.

In this long-out-of-print oral history classic, Alice and Staughton Lynd chronicle the stories of more than two dozen working-class organizers who occupied factories, held sit-down strikes, walked out, picketed, and found other bold and innovative ways to fight for workers' rights. Rank and File brings the militancy of these firebrand organizers to life - whether it was in founding unions, challenging sexism and racism, safety violations, and management intimidation, or working for broader social changes.

On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compañía de Santa Gertrudis may have committed murder. The alert was first raised at six in the morning: A fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that “no more than 10” men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all 10 were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not 10 but 87. And there were seven survivors.

Labor unions and courts have rarely been allies. From their earliest efforts to organize, unions have been confronted with hostile judges and antiunion doctrines. In this book, Julius G. Getman argues that while the role of the Supreme Court has become more central in shaping labor law, its opinions betray a profound ignorance of labor relations along with a persisting bias against unions.

Humans versus Nature tells a history of the global environment from the Stone Age to the present, emphasizing the adversarial relationship between the human and natural worlds. Nature is cast as an active protagonist rather than a mere backdrop or victim of human malfeasance. Daniel R. Headrick shows how environmental changes - epidemics, climate shocks, and volcanic eruptions - have molded human societies and cultures, sometimes overwhelming them.

Chris Anderson takes you to the front lines of a new industrial revolution as today’s entrepreneurs, using open source design and 3-D printing, bring manufacturing to the desktop. In an age of custom-fabricated, do-it-yourself product design and creation, the collective potential of a million garage tinkerers and enthusiasts is about to be unleashed, driving a resurgence of American manufacturing. A generation of "Makers" using the Web’s innovation model will help drive the next big wave in the global economy, as the new technologies of digital design and rapid prototyping gives everyone the power to invent.

This "provocative study" looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class (the New Yorker). The era didn't just bring about misery and poverty. On the contrary, Emma Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom.

When the local iron mine began hiring women in 1975, Lois Jenson, a single mother on welfare, didn't think twice about accepting the grueling but well-paid job. What she hadn't considered was that she was entering a male-dominated society that fiercely resisted the inclusion of women, a prejudice born out in the brutal harassment of every female miner.

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society’s members.

Powerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. In this brilliant book, labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers’ strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about (and then provides an annotated list of the 150 most important moments in American labor history in the appendix).

As World War II wound down in 1945 and the cold war heated up, the skilled trades that made up the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) began a tumultuous strike at the major Hollywood studios. This turmoil escalated further when the studios retaliated by locking out CSU in 1946. This labor unrest unleashed a fury of Red-baiting that allowed studio moguls to crush the union and seize control of the production process, with far-reaching consequences.

On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a Chicago labor rally, wounding dozens of policemen, seven of whom eventually died. A wave of mass hysteria swept the country, leading to a sensational trial that culminated in four controversial executions and dealt a blow to the labor movement from which it would take decades to recover. Historian James Green recounts the rise of the first great labor movement in the wake of the Civil War and brings to life an epic 20-year struggle for the eight-hour workday.

Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger's widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks.

Today when you factor in the interest on the national debt from past wars and total defense expenditures the United States spends almost 40% of its federal budget on the military. It accounts for over 46% of total world arms spending. Before World War II it spent almost nothing on defense and hardly anyone paid any income taxes. You can't have big wars without big government. Such big expenditures are now threatening to harm the national economy.

In this landmark work, acclaimed historian Joshua Freeman has created an epic portrait of a nation both galvanized by change and driven by conflict. Beginning in 1945, the economic juggernaut awakened by World War II transformed a country once defined by its regional character into a uniform and cohesive power and set the stage for the United States’ rise to global dominance. Meanwhile, Freeman locates the profound tragedy that has shaped the path of American civic life.

Between 1848 and 1899, more gold was removed from the earth than had been mined in the 3,000 preceding years, bringing untold wealth to individuals and nations. But friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over "the Chinese Question": Would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration?

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, then this two-in-one books bundle is for you. Includes: Age of Enlightenment and The Industrial Revolution.

For most of human existence, people lived in a somewhat similar fashion. Everything that has been produced, from food and raw materials to clothing and other finished products, has been done either solely by hand or with some help of animal power. This was the same across the eras and throughout the world, no matter how advanced or backward the various civilizations were. Yet, our lives today couldn’t be more different.

The Communist Manifesto was first published in London in 1848, by two young men in their late 20s. Its impact reverberated across the globe and throughout the next century, and it has come to be recognised as one of the most important political texts ever written. Maintaining that the history of all societies is a history of class struggle, the manifesto proclaims that communism is the only route to equality, and is a call to action aimed at the proletariat. It is an essential listen for anyone seeking to understand our modern political landscape.