Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution - Hardcover

Bezis-Selfa, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801439930 ISBN 13: 9780801439933

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2003

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

John Bezís-Selfa is Associate Professor of History at Wheaton College.

From the Inside Flap

"John Bezís-Selfa has probed the manuscript material on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century iron manufacture with extraordinary diligence and attention to detail, and this has allowed him to piece together a remarkable story: ironmasters and ironworkers, both slave and free, struggling to define the terms of labor in the most important American domestic industry of this era. The author s research in these difficult sources is a model of its kind, and he has written his findings in a clear, graceful prose style that is a pleasure to read. Bezís-Selfa has mastered his subject, and that mastery shows through on every page of the book." Charles B. Dew, Williams College

"This carefully researched, well-written book about work and workers in the iron industry establishes John Bezís-Selfa as a leading scholar in the field of early American labor history." Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh, co-author of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801439930
• ISBN 13: 9780801439933
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296