Proceedings Of The Canal History And Technology Symposium

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Canals For A Nation

Author : Ronald E. Shaw
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2014-02-07
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780813145815

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Canals For A Nation by Ronald E. Shaw Pdf

All but forgotten except as a part of nostalgic lore, American canals during the first half of the nineteenth century provided a transportation network that was vital to the development of the new nation. They lowered transportation costs, carried a vast grain trade from western farms to eastern ports, delivered Pennsylvania coal to New York, and carried thousands of passengers at what seemed effortless speed. Along their courses sprang up new towns and cities and with them new economic growth. Canals for a Nation brings together in one volume a survey of all the major American canals. Here are accounts of innovative engineering, of near heroic figures who devoted their lives to canals, and of canal projects that triumphed over all the uncertainties of the political process.

The Hour of Fate

Author : Susan Berfield
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2020-05-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9781635572476

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The Hour of Fate by Susan Berfield Pdf

A riveting narrative of Wall Street buccaneering, political intrigue, and two of American history's most colossal characters, struggling for mastery in an era of social upheaval and rampant inequality. It seemed like no force in the world could slow J. P. Morgan's drive to power. In the summer of 1901, the financier was assembling his next mega-deal: Northern Securities, an enterprise that would affirm his dominance in America's most important industry-the railroads. Then, a bullet from an anarchist's gun put an end to the business-friendly presidency of William McKinley. A new chief executive bounded into office: Theodore Roosevelt. He was convinced that as big business got bigger, the government had to check the influence of the wealthiest or the country would inch ever closer to collapse. By March 1902, battle lines were drawn: the government sued Northern Securities for antitrust violations. But as the case ramped up, the coal miners' union went on strike and the anthracite pits that fueled Morgan's trains and heated the homes of Roosevelt's citizens went silent. With millions of dollars on the line, winter bearing down, and revolution in the air, it was a crisis that neither man alone could solve. Richly detailed and propulsively told, The Hour of Fate is the gripping story of a banker and a president thrown together in the crucible of national emergency even as they fought in court. The outcome of the strike and the case would change the course of our history. Today, as the country again asks whether saving democracy means taming capital, the lessons of Roosevelt and Morgan's time are more urgent than ever. Winner of the 2021 Theodore Roosevelt Association Book Prize Finalist for the Presidential Leadership Book Award

Routes of Power

Author : Christopher F. Jones
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2014-04-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674419629

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Routes of Power by Christopher F. Jones Pdf

The fossil fuel revolution is usually rendered as a tale of historic advances in energy production. In this perspective-changing account, Christopher F. Jones instead tells a story of advances in energy access—canals, pipelines, and wires that delivered power in unprecedented quantities to cities and factories at a great distance from production sites. He shows that in the American mid-Atlantic region between 1820 and 1930, the construction of elaborate transportation networks for coal, oil, and electricity unlocked remarkable urban and industrial growth along the eastern seaboard. But this new transportation infrastructure did not simply satisfy existing consumer demand—it also whetted an appetite for more abundant and cheaper energy, setting the nation on a path toward fossil fuel dependence. Between the War of 1812 and the Great Depression, low-cost energy supplied to cities through a burgeoning delivery system allowed factory workers to mass-produce goods on a scale previously unimagined. It also allowed people and products to be whisked up and down the East Coast at speeds unattainable in a country dependent on wood, water, and muscle. But an energy-intensive America did not benefit all its citizens equally. It provided cheap energy to some but not others; it channeled profits to financiers rather than laborers; and it concentrated environmental harms in rural areas rather than cities. Today, those who wish to pioneer a more sustainable and egalitarian energy order can learn valuable lessons from this history of the nation’s first steps toward dependence on fossil fuels.

St. Clair

Author : Anthony Wallace
Publisher : Knopf
Page : 780 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2012-09-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780307826107

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St. Clair by Anthony Wallace Pdf

Located near the southern edge of the Pennsylvania anthracite, the town of St. Clair in the early half of the 19th century seemed to be perfectly situated to provide fuel to the iron and steel industry that was the heart of the Industrial Revolution in America. It was a time of unprecedented promise and possibility for the region, and yet, in the years between 1830 and 1880, only grandiose illusions flourished there. St. Clair itself succumbed early on to a devastating economic blight, one that would in time affect anthracite mining everywhere. In this dramatic work of social history, Anthony F. C. Wallace re-creates St. Clair in those years when expectations collided with reality, when the coal trade was in chronic distress, exacerbated by the epic battles between the forces of labor and capital. As he did in his Bancroft Prize-winning Rockdale, Wallace uses public records and private papers to reconstruct the operation of an anthracite colliery and the life of a working-man’s town totally dependent upon it. He describes the labor hierarchy of the collieries, the communal spirit that sprang up in the outlying mine patches, the polyglot immigrant life in the taverns and churchs, and the workingmen’s societies that provided identity to the miners and gave relief to families in distress. He examines the birth of the first effective miners’ union and documents the escalating antagonism between Irish immigrant workers—mostly Catholic—and the Protestant middle classes who owned the collieries. Wallace reveals the blindness, greed, and self-congratulation of the mine owners and operators. These “heroes” of the entrepreneurial wars disregarded geologists’ warnings that the coal seams south of St. Clair were virtually inaccessible and, at best, extremely costly to mine, and then blamed their economic woes on the lack of a high tariff on imported British iron. To cut costs, they ignored the most basic and safety engineering practices and then blamed “the careless miner” and “Irish hooligans” for the catastrophic accidents that resulted. In thrall to a great dream of wealth and power, they plunged ahead to bankruptcy while the miners paid with their lives. St. Clair is a rich and illuminating work of scholarship—an engrossing portrait of a disaster-prone industry (a portrait that stands as a sober warning to the nuclear-power industry) and of the tragic hubris of a ruling class that brough ruin upon a Pennsylvania coal town at a crucial moment in its history.

Coalcracker Culture

Author : Harold W. Aurand
Publisher : Susquehanna University Press
Page : 166 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1575910640

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Coalcracker Culture by Harold W. Aurand Pdf

The knowledge that they traded their lives for a job generated an overarching fear of losing their income."--BOOK JACKET.

Volatile Places

Author : Valerie Gunter,Steve Kroll-Smith
Publisher : SAGE Publications
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2006-11-22
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781452222868

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Volatile Places by Valerie Gunter,Steve Kroll-Smith Pdf

Volatile Places: A Sociology of Communities and Environmental Controversies is a thoughtful guide to the spirited public controversies that inevitably occur when environments and human communities collide. The movie "An Inconvenient Truth" based on the environmental activism of Al Gore and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina are specifically highlighted. Authors Valerie Gunter and Steve Kroll-Smith begin with a simple observation and offer a provocative case study approach to the investigation of community and environmental controversies.

Manufacturing

Author : David O. Whitten,Bessie E. Whitten
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 520 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 1990-09-27
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780313368196

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Manufacturing by David O. Whitten,Bessie E. Whitten Pdf

Overall, this first volume in the series should render business research in manufacturing a good deal easier by bringing together insightful industry histories and detailed critical bibliographies. This series has much to recommend it. Future volumes will be eagerly awaited. Reference Books Bulletin This historical and bibliographical reference work is the first volume of Greenwood Press's Handbook of American Business History, a series intended to supplement current bibliographic materials pertaining to business history. Devoted to manufacturing, this work uses the Enterprise Standard Industrial Classification (ESIC) to divide the subject into distinct segments, from which contributors have developed histories and bibliographies of the different types of manufacturing. Though authors were given sets of guidelines to follow, they were also allowed the flexibility to work in a format that best suited the material. Each contribution in this volume contains three important elements: a concise history of the manufacturing sector, a bibliographic essay, and a bibliography. Some contributions appear in three distinct parts, while others are combined into one or two segments; all build on currently available material for students and scholars doing research on business and industry. The contributors, who include business, economic, and social historians, as well as engineers and lawyers, have covered such topics as bakery products, industrial chemicals and synthetics, engines and turbines, and household appliances. Also included are an introductory essay that covers general works and a comprehensive index. This book should be a useful tool for courses in business and industry, and a valuable resource for college, university, and public libraries.

Engineering America

Author : Richard Haw
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 649 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2020-02-12
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780190663926

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Engineering America by Richard Haw Pdf

John Roebling was one of the nineteenth century's most brilliant engineers, ingenious inventors, successful manufacturers, and fascinating personalities. Raised in a German backwater amid the war-torn chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, he immigrated to the US in 1831, where he became wealthy and acclaimed, eventually receiving a carte-blanche contract to build one of the nineteenth century's most stupendous and daring works of engineering: a gigantic suspension bridge to span the East River between New York and Brooklyn. In between, he thought, wrote, and worked tirelessly. He dug canals and surveyed railroads; he planned communities and founded new industries. Horace Greeley called him "a model immigrant"; generations later, F. Scott Fitzgerald worked on a script for the movie version of his life. Like his finest creations, Roebling was held together by the delicate balance of countervailing forces. On the surface, his life was exemplary and his accomplishments legion. As an immigrant and employer, he was respected throughout the world. As an engineer, his works profoundly altered the physical landscape of America. He was a voracious reader, a fervent abolitionist, and an engaged social commentator. His understanding of the natural world, however, bordered on the occult and his opinions about medicine are best described as medieval. For a man of science and great self-certainty, he was also remarkably quick to seize on a whole host of fads and foolish trends. Yet Roebling held these strands together. Throughout his life, he believed in the moral application of science and technology, that bridges--along with other great works of connection, the Atlantic Cable, the Transcontinental Railroad--could help bring people together, erase divisions, and heal wounds. Like Walt Whitman, Roebling was deeply committed to the creation of a more perfect union, forged from the raw materials of the continent. John Roebling was a complex, deeply divided yet undoubtedly influential figure, and this biography illuminates not only his works but also the world of nineteenth-century America. Roebling's engineering feats are well known, but the man himself is not; for alongside the drama of large scale construction lies an equally rich drama of intellectual and social development and crisis, one that mirrored and reflected the great forces, trials, and failures of nineteenth century America.

The Real Disaster Is Above Ground

Author : J. Stephen Kroll-Smith,Stephen Robert Couch
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2014-07-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780813150567

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The Real Disaster Is Above Ground by J. Stephen Kroll-Smith,Stephen Robert Couch Pdf

In the 1950s Centralia was a small town, like many others in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. But since the 1960s, it has been consumed, outwardly and inwardly by a fire that has inexorably spread in the abandoned mines beneath it. The earth smokes, subsides, and breathes poisonous gases. No less destructive has been the spread of dissension and enmity among the townspeople. The Real Disaster Above Ground tells the story of the fire and the tragic failure of all efforts to counter it. This study of the Centralia fire represents the most thorough canvass of the documentary materials and the community that has appeared. The authors report on the futile efforts of residents to reach a common understanding of an underground threat that was not readily visible and invited multiple interpretations. They trace the hazard management strategies of government agencies that, ironically, all too often created additional threats to the welfare of Centralians. They report on the birth and demise of community organizations, each with its own solution to the problem and its diehard partisans. The final solution, now being put into effect, is to abandon the town and relocate its people. Centralia's environmental disaster, the authors argue, is not a local or isolated phenomenon. It warns of the danger lurking in our own technology when safeguards fail and disaster management policy is not in place to respond to failure, as the examples of Chernobyl and Bhopal have clearly demonstrated. The lessons in this study of the fate of a small town in Pennsylvania are indeed sobering. They should be pondered by a variety of social scientists and planners, by all those dealing with the behavior of people under stress and those responsible for the welfare of the public.

Democratic Miners

Author : Perry K. Blatz
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 1994-01-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0791418197

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Democratic Miners by Perry K. Blatz Pdf

Democratic Miners traces the history of work and labor relations in the anthracite coal industry, focusing on conditions that led up to, and followed, the famous strike of 1902. That strike, an epic five-and-a-half-month struggle, led the federal government to intervene in a labor dispute for the first time in American history. Focusing on the workplace, Blatz puts the 1902 strike in the context of a turbulent half-century of labor-management relations. Those years saw the unionization of the anthracite fields under the United Mine Workers of America, amidst an evolving democratic tradition of rank-and-file protest against corporate control, and ironically ended with a growing rift between miners and union leadership. Unlike many books on labor relations, this work concentrates especially on the workers themselves. Working-class as opposed to union history, it contributes greatly to our understanding of working-class formation in the Progressive years.

New Risks: Issues and Management

Author : Louis A. Cox,Paolo F. Ricci
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 701 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2013-06-29
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9781489907592

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New Risks: Issues and Management by Louis A. Cox,Paolo F. Ricci Pdf

This volume contains the proceedings of the 1986 annual meeting and conference of the Society for Risk Analysis. It provides a detailed view of both mature disciplines and emerging areas within the fields of health, safety, and environmental risk analysis as they existed in 1986. In selecting and organizing topics for this conference, we sought both (i) to identify and include new ideas and application areas that would be of lasting interest to risk analysts and to users of risk analysis results, and (ii) to include innovative methods and applications in established areas of risk analysis. In the three years since the conference, many of the topics presented there for the first time to a broad risk analysis audience have become well developed-and sometimes hotly debated-areas of applied risk research. Several, such as the public health hazards from indoor air pollutants, radon in the home, high-voltage electric fields, and the AIDS epidemic, have been the subjects of headlines since 1986. Older areas, such as hazardous waste site ranking and remediation, air emissions dispersion modeling and exposure assessment, transportation safety, seismic and nuclear risk assessment, and occupational safety in the chemical industry, have continued to receive new treatments and to benefit from advances in quantitative risk assessment methods, as documented in the theoretical and methodological papers in this volume. A theme of the meeting was the importance of new technologies and the new and uncertain risks that they create.