Iron Towns


Book Description

Twenty years ago, Liam Corwen and Dee Dee Ahmed were on the cusp of a better future, Liam as a promising footballer and Dee Dee as a singer in a girl band. Now they're both eking out an existence back in their home town. As the old steelworks rust and the local football club limps towards relegation and liquidation, Dee Dee recalls the tragic events that changed their lives. Liam thinks back to the great players of the past, and wonders: could redemption, greatness even, still wait for them, here among the abandoned cranes and docks and housing estates? Evoking the landscape and myth of old, forgotten England, Iron Towns is a story of our dreams of youth, football, and industrial progress - and what happens when those dreams recede into the past. New paperback edition featuring Cartwright's acclaimed essay on the EU referendum.




Mastering Iron


Book Description

Veins of iron run deep in the history of America. Iron making began almost as soon as European settlement, with the establishment of the first ironworks in colonial Massachusetts. Yet it was Great Britain that became the Atlantic world’s dominant low-cost, high-volume producer of iron, a position it retained throughout the nineteenth century. It was not until after the Civil War that American iron producers began to match the scale and efficiency of the British iron industry. In Mastering Iron, Anne Kelly Knowles argues that the prolonged development of the US iron industry was largely due to geographical problems the British did not face. Pairing exhaustive manuscript research with analysis of a detailed geospatial database that she built of the industry, Knowles reconstructs the American iron industry in unprecedented depth, from locating hundreds of iron companies in their social and environmental contexts to explaining workplace culture and social relations between workers and managers. She demonstrates how ironworks in Alabama, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia struggled to replicate British technologies but, in the attempt, brought about changes in the American industry that set the stage for the subsequent age of steel. Richly illustrated with dozens of original maps and period art work, all in full color, Mastering Iron sheds new light on American ambitions and highlights the challenges a young nation faced as it grappled with its geographic conditions.




Brexlit


Book Description

Britain's vote to leave the European Union in the summer of 2016 came as a shock to many observers. But writers had long been exploring anxieties and fractures in British society – from Euroscepticism, to immigration, to devolution, to post-truth narratives – that came to the fore in the Brexit campaign and its aftermath. Reading these tensions back into contemporary British writing, Kristian Shaw coins the term Brexlit to deliver the first in-depth study of how writers engaged with these issues before and after the referendum result. Examining the work of over a hundred British authors, including Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ali Smith, as well as popular fiction by Andrew Marr and Stanley Johnson, Brexlit explores how a new and urgent genre of post-Brexit fiction is beginning to emerge.




The English Town


Book Description

By looking at England's cathedral towns, Regency spas and industrial cities, and at their market squares, docks, council chambers and assembly rooms, the author traces the development of English towns through the centuries.




The Vanguard


Book Description




The First Industrial Nation


Book Description

This celebrated and seminal text examines the industrial revolution, from its genesis in pre-industrial Britain, through its development and into maturity. A chapter-by-chapter analysis explores topics such as economic growth, agriculture, trade finance, labour and transport. First published in 1969, The First Industrial Nation is widely recognised as a classic text for students of the industrial revolution.




Capital's Utopia


Book Description

In the 1890s the Apollo Iron and Steel Company ended a bitterly contested labor dispute by hiring replacement workers from the surrounding countryside. To avoid future unrest, however, the company sought to gain tighter control over its workers not only at the factory but also in their homes. Drawing upon a philosophy of reform movements in Europe and the United States, the firm decided that providing workers with good housing and a good urban environment would make them more loyal and productive. In 1895, Apollo Iron and Steel built a new, integrated, non-unionized steelworks and hired the nation's preeminent landscape architectural firm (Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot) to design the model industrial town: Vandergrift. In Capital's Utopia: Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855-1916, Anne E. Mosher offers the first comprehensive geographical overview of the industrial restructuring of an American steelworks and its workforce in the late nineteenth–century. In addition, by offering a thorough analysis of the Olmsted plan, Mosher integrates historical geography and labor history with landscape architectural history and urban studies. As a result, this book is far more than a case study. It is a window into an important period of industrial development and its consequences on communities and environments in the world-famous steel country of southwestern Pennsylvania.




Rediscover the Hidden New Jersey


Book Description

Did you know——that a New Jerseyan was the first president of the United States?—that New Jersey was the site of the first organized college football game?—that New Jersey was the location of one of the most devastating espionage attacks of World War I?—that the heroics of a New Jersey woman saved thousands of people from dying of yellow fever?—that one of the first American folk heroes lived in New Jersey—and jumped off waterfalls? These and other fascinating stories can be found in the newly updated Rediscover the Hidden New Jersey, a treasury of New Jersey stories that celebrate the unique heritage and importance of the Garden State. Russell Roberts has scoured New Jersey, from High Point to Cape May, to bring readers a delightful potpourri of facts, essays, lists, photos, stories, and legends about New Jersey. Readers will learn how New Jersey used to be the center of the motion picture universe, the origin of the Jersey Devil and other popular tall tales, where Norman Mailer and Abbot & Costello were born, where Aaron Burr and Leo, the M-G-M lion, lie buried, and much more. Learn about the geology of New Jersey, find out about the state’s ever-changing weather, and how New Jersey was chosen for the famous (or infamous) War of the Worlds radio broadcast that panicked the nation. All this and more is in Rediscover the Hidden New Jersey, the ultimate New Jersey book. This revised edition contains new sections on Lawnside, the Morris Canal, Albert Einstein in Princeton, The Bordentown Manual Training School, Rockefeller/Ocean County Park, the bicycle railroad, Morro Castle, Alice Paul, and more.




Call it North Country


Book Description

From Back Cover: This is a newspaperman's history of the Upper Peninsula. Intrigued by the place name Michigamme, Martin and his wife stopped there on their wedding trip in 1940 and became enchanted with the Upper Peninsula. Out of that attraction came more visits, a string of interviews and a series of tales told by miners, loggers, hunters and trappers. Originally published in 1944, it is a collection of nineteen lively stories told in convenient chunks for quick reading.-Detroit Free Press. The passage of time provides a better test of the quality of a book than litmus paper does of the acidity of a solution. This book was originally written in 1944 by one of our most powerful documentary authors. [Call it North Country] reads like a novel. If you're a history buff, it reads better than a novel. This book could not be written today. The witnesses to the development of upper Michigan would be missing and twice or thrice told tales would lose much detail and would not have the ring of truth which authenticates history.-Inland Seas.