[PDF] Forging America eBook

Author : John Bezis-Selfa
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 46,84 MB
Release : 2018-10-18
Category : History
ISBN : 1501722190

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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.

Author : Sidney Lens
Publisher : Pluto Press
Page : 484 pages
File Size : 39,7 MB
Release : 2003-06-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9780745321004

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From Mexico to Vietnam, from Nicaragua to Lebanon, and more recently to Kosovo, East Timor and now Iraq, the United States has intervened in the affairs of other nations. Yet American leaders continue to promote the myth that America is benevolent and peace-loving, and involves itself in conflicts only to defend the rights of others; excesses and cruelties, though sometimes admitted, usually are regarded as momentary aberrations.This classic book is the first truly comprehensive history of American imperialism. Now fully updated, and featuring a new introduction by Howard Zinn, it is a must-read for all students and scholars of American history. Renowned author Sidney Lens shows how the United States, from the time it gained its own independence, has used every available means - political, economic, and military - to dominate other nations.Lens presents a powerful argument, meticulously pieced together from a huge array of sources, to prove that imperialism is an inevitable consequence of the U.S. economic system. Surveying the pressures, external and internal, on the United States today, he concludes that like any other empire, the reign of the U.S. will end -- and he examines how this time of reckoning may come about.

Author : James Horn
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 247 pages
File Size : 38,1 MB
Release : 2018-10-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1541698800

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The essential history of the extraordinary year in which American democracy and American slavery emerged hand in hand in colonial Virginia. Along the banks of the James River, Virginia, during an oppressively hot spell in the middle of summer 1619, two events occurred within a few weeks of each other that would profoundly shape the course of history. In the newly built church at Jamestown, the General Assembly -- the first gathering of a representative governing body in America -- came together. A few weeks later, a battered privateer entered the Chesapeake Bay carrying the first African slaves to land on mainland English America. In 1619, historian James Horn sheds new light on the year that gave birth to the great paradox of our nation: slavery in the midst of freedom. This portentous year marked both the origin of the most important political development in American history, the rise of democracy, and the emergence of what would in time become one of the nation's greatest challenges: the corrosive legacy of racial inequality that has afflicted America since its beginning.

Author : Gary B. Nash
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 16,78 MB
Release : 1988
Category : African Americans
ISBN : 9780674309333

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This book is the first to trace the fortunes of the earliest large free black community in the U.S. Nash shows how black Philadelphians struggled to shape a family life, gain occupational competence, organize churches, establish social networks, advance cultural institutions, educate their children, and train leaders who would help abolish slavery.

Author : David Venditta
Publisher :
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 29,16 MB
Release : 2010-09-24
Category : Steel industry and trade
ISBN : 9780982942208

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A sweeping narrative history, Forging America chronicles the rise and fall of Bethlehem Steel, beginning with the 19th century Welsh ironmaker who kindled a fire in anthracite-rich eastern Pennsylvania and ending with the second largest U.S. steelmaker's collapse in 2003. Bethlehem Steel was a powerful manifestation of American capitalism. The industrial titan built the Golden Gate Bridge and much of the New York City skyline and stood at the center of defense efforts through two world wars. Along the way, Bethlehem Steel became intertwined with the lives of icons Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and Babe Ruth. More than the story of a grand enterprise, Forging America is about its captains and the people who poured their lives and souls into the gritty, dangerous business of making steel.