Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making 1801-1885 - Couverture rigide

McGaw, Judith A.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0691656819 ISBN 13 : 9780691656816

Editeur : Princeton University Press, 2019

Synopsis

On a visit to a Berkshire paper mill, the narrator of Herman Melville's "The Tartarus of Maids" views the "wonderful" papermaking machine with awe and calls it a "miracle of inscrutable intricacy." Manifesting in their factories and towns such nineteenth-century fascination with machinery, paper mill owners and workers made an industrial revolution in Berkshrie County, Massachusetts. This book examines their experiences from the era of craft production through several generations of sustained technological change to answer two major questions: What accounts for the widespread and rapid adoption of machines in nineteenth-century America? And how did the new technology help to transform America socially and culturally? Rejecting technological determinism, Judith McGaw effectively integrates labor, business, social, and women's history with technological history to bring to life the human decisions that made mechanization possible.
In compelling detail the author offers new explanations of how change in the craft era paved the way for industrialization and how paternalism worked in small-scale industry. She also provides a thoughtful discussion of the interaction between evangelical culture and the emerging industrial order, and a close analysis of how nineteenth-century gender distinctions fostered mechanization.
Judith A. McGaw is Assistant Professor of History of Technology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Originally published in 1987.

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Date d'édition: 2019
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0691656819
• ISBN 13: 9780691656816
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 464
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible