Customer Reviews

The industrial worker, 1840-1860: The reaction of American industrial society to the advance of the industrial revolution (Quadrangle paperback)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Noam Chomsky: "Actually one of the most interesting books I know, and if you haven't read I'd urge you to, is the first modern book on labor history I know of. ... It's mostly quotes from the labor press, which are just fascinating. ... It's very interesting, it's very eloquent, very well-written."

Although historians of the two decades preceding the Civil War have focused on the slavery issue, one of the major notes of American life during the period was created by the Industrial Revolution. The social and industrial upheavals that followed from it were remarkable for their vitality and resource. While the results of this revolution largely please us today, then it was repugnant to an astonishingly large number of Americans. The loses of status and independence among industrial workers were severe and troubling, but they lost ground also as consumers and producers - and in the face of national prosperity. In protests grounded in religion and politics, the workers sought first to preserve those freedoms they feared they were losing, later to win material gains. What remained of the moral force of this reform agitation was, as Mr. Ware writes, swept into the slavery struggle. His illuminating book analyzes the conditions which brought on the Industrial Revolution, and traces and interprets the labor movements and experiments that developed in response to the factory system.


Mr. Ware "writes with vigor and with refreshing freedom from traditional viewpoints...He raises real problems and throws light upon them."
New Republic