The Black Rock that Built America


Book Description

The Black Rock That Built America explains how, on the backs of thousands of European immigrants, America was transformed from a mostly rural nation into the world's greatest industrial power. As the nation expanded in the nineteenth century, anthracite coal fueled the making of steel, the building of railroads, the operation of factories, and the heating of homes. This book tells of the struggles these immigrant miners endured while performing the grueling and dangerous work of extracting anthracite coal from the earth in order to earn their place in America.




Right to Rock


Book Description

The original architects of rock 'n roll were black musicians, but by the 1980s, rock music produced by African Americans was no longer "authentically black." Mahon offers an in-depth account of how, since 1985, members of the Black Rock Coalition have broadened understandings of black identity and culture through rock music.




The American Steel Industry, 1850–1970


Book Description

A richly detailed account of the American steel industry from its beginnings until 1970, when its long period of international leadership was challenged, this book interprets steel from viewpoints of historical and economic geography. It considers both physical factors, such as resouces, and human factors such as market, organization, and governmental policy. In major discussions of the east coast, Pittsburgh, the Ohio Valley, the Great Lakes, the South and the West, Warren analyzes the location and relocation of steel plants over 120 years. He explains the influence on location of a variety of factors: The accessibility of resources, the cost of transportation, the existence of specialized markets, and the availability of entrepreneurial skills, capital, and labor. He also evaluates the role of management in the development of the industry, through an analysis of individual companies, including Bethlehem, Carnegie, United States Steel, Kaiser, Inland, Jones and Laughlin, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Warren examines the influence exerted on the industry by complex technological changes and weighs their significance against market forces and the supply of natural resources. In the production process alone, the industry changed from pig iron to steel; from charcoal to anthracite; to bituminous coking coal; and from the widespread use of low-grade ore from the eastern United States, to the high quality but localized deposits of the Upper Great Lakes, to imported ores. Unlike other industrialized nations, the United States has undergone major geographical shifts in steel consumption since the 1850s. As the American population moved south and west into new territory, steel followed. Warren concludes that these radical alterations in the distribution and demand were the decisive force in the location of steel production.




American Lumberman


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Scientific American


Book Description

Monthly magazine devoted to topics of general scientific interest.




Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers


Book Description

Vols. 29-30 contain papers of the International Engineering Congress, Chicago, 1893; v. 54, pts. A-F, papers of the International Engineering Congress, St. Louis, 1904.




v. 1-2. American constitutions


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We're Still Here


Book Description

The economy has been brutal to American workers for several decades. The chance to give one's children a better life than one's own -- the promise at the heart of the American Dream -- is withering away. While onlookers assume those suffering in marginalized working-class communities will instinctively rise up, the 2016 election threw into sharp relief how little we know about how the working-class translate their grievances into politics. In We're Still Here, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor, unions, marriage, church, and social clubs have diminished. In their place, she argues, individualized strategies for coping with pain, and finding personal redemption, have themselves become sources of political stimulus and reaction among the working class. Understanding how generations of Democratic voters come to reject the social safety net and often politics altogether requires moving beyond simple partisanship into a maze of addiction, joblessness, family disruption, violence, and trauma. Instead, Silva argues that we need to uncover the relationships, loyalties, longings, and moral visions that underlie and generate the civic and political disengagement of working-class people. We're Still Here provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics that will spark new tensions but also open up the possibility for shifting alliances and new possibilities.




The American Pioneer


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