Coal, Iron, and Slaves

Coal, Iron, and Slaves PDF Author: Ronald Lewis
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Studies slave labor in Virginia coal fields and ironworks around Baltimore and Richmond. Finds that slaveowners in these areas did not exercise absolute authority, but rather pragmatically yielded to slave demands within certain limit in order to maintain production and profit.

Slave Labor in the Virginia Iron Industry

Slave Labor in the Virginia Iron Industry PDF Author: Kathleen Bruce
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Iron and steel workers
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description


Tredegar Iron Works: Richmond’s Foundry on the James

Tredegar Iron Works: Richmond’s Foundry on the James PDF Author: Nathan Vernon Madison
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 146711894X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1

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Book Description
One of the most important industrial landmarks in the nation lies in the heart of historic Richmond. The Tredegar Iron Works was the most prodigious ordnance supplier to the Confederacy during the Civil War, as well as an industrial behemoth in its own right. Named for the hometown of the Welsh engineers who built it, Tredegar remained one of Richmond's chief industrial entities for over a century. It produced ordnance during five wars and helped build the railroads that rapidly spread across the nation during the Gilded Age. Author Nathan Vernon Madison, utilizing a wealth of primary sources and firsthand accounts, chronicles the full history of a Richmond industrial icon.

Bond of Iron

Bond of Iron PDF Author: Charles B. Dew
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393313598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
A study of African-American workers empowered and partly liberated by their skills. At Buffalo Forge, an extensive ironmaking and farming enterprise in Virginia before the Civil War, a unique treasury of materials yields an "engrossing, often surprising record of everyday life on an estate in the antebellum South" (Kirkus Reviews).

Coal, Iron, and Slaves

Coal, Iron, and Slaves PDF Author: Ronald Lewis
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Studies slave labor in Virginia coal fields and ironworks around Baltimore and Richmond. Finds that slaveowners in these areas did not exercise absolute authority, but rather pragmatically yielded to slave demands within certain limit in order to maintain production and profit.

Black Coal Miners in America

Black Coal Miners in America PDF Author: Ronald L. Lewis
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 9780813116105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
From the early day of mining in colonial Virginia and Maryland up to the time of World War II, blacks were an important part of the labor force in the coal industry. Yet in this, as in other enterprises, their role has heretofore been largely ignored. Now Roland L. Lewis redresses the balance in this comprehensive history of black coal miners in America. The experience of blacks in the industry has varied widely over time and by region, and the approach of this study is therefore more comparative than chronological. Its aim is to define the patterns of race relations that prevailed among the m.

Mastering Iron

Mastering Iron PDF Author: Anne Kelly Knowles
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226448614
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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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.

The Negro Ironworker in Ante Bellum Virginia

The Negro Ironworker in Ante Bellum Virginia PDF Author:
Publisher: Ardent Media
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 16

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Book Description


Artisan Workers in the Upper South

Artisan Workers in the Upper South PDF Author: Diane Barnes
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807133132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Though deeply entrenched in antebellum life, the artisans who lived and worked in Petersburg, Virginia, in the 1800s -- including carpenters, blacksmiths, coach makers, bakers, and other skilled craftsmen -- helped transform their planter-centered agricultural community into one of the most industrialized cities in the Upper South. These mechanics, as the artisans called themselves, successfully lobbied for new railroad lines and other amenities they needed to open their factories and shops, and turned a town whose livelihood once depended almost entirely on tobacco exports into a bustling modern city. In Artisan Workers in the Upper South, L. Diane Barnes closely examines the relationships between Petersburg's skilled white, free black, and slave mechanics and the roles they played in southern Virginia's emerging market economy. Barnes demonstrates that, despite studies that emphasize the backwardness of southern development, modern industry and the institution of slavery proved quite compatible in the Upper South. Petersburg joined the industrialized world in part because of the town's proximity to northern cities and resources, but it succeeded because its citizens capitalized on their uniquely southern resource: slaves. Petersburg artisans realized quickly that owning slaves could increase the profitability of their businesses, and these artisans -- including some free African Americans -- entered the master class when they could. Slave-owning mechanics, both white and black, gained wealth and status in society, and they soon joined an emerging middle class. Not all mechanics could afford slaves, however, and those who could not struggled to survive in the new economy. Forced to work as journeymen and face the unpleasant reality of permanent wage labor, the poorer mechanics often resented their inability to prosper like their fellow artisans. These differing levels of success, Barnes shows, created a sharp class divide that rivaled the racial divide in the artisan community. Unlike their northern counterparts, who united as a political force and organized strikes to effect change, artisans in the Upper South did not rise up in protest against the prevailing social order. Skilled white mechanics championed free manual labor -- a common refrain of northern artisans -- but they carefully limited the term "free" to whites and simultaneously sought alliances with slaveholding planters. Even those artisans who didn't own slaves, Barnes explains, rarely criticized the wealthy planters, who not only employed and traded with artisans, but also controlled both state and local politics. Planters, too, guarded against disparaging free labor too loudly, and their silence, together with that of the mechanics, helped maintain the precariously balanced social structure. Artisan Workers in the Upper South rejects the notion of the antebellum South as a semifeudal planter-centered political economy and provides abundant evidence that some areas of the South embraced industrial capitalism and economic modernity as readily as communities in the North.

Slavery in the American Mountain South

Slavery in the American Mountain South PDF Author: Wilma A. Dunaway
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521012157
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
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The Price of Freedom

The Price of Freedom PDF Author: T. Stephen Whitman
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813183588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
A stereotypical image of manumission is that of a benign plantation owner freeing his slaves on his deathbed. But as Stephen Whitman demonstrates, the truth was far more complex, especially in border states where manumission was much more common. Whitman analyzes the economic and social history of Baltimore to show how the vigorous growth of the city required the exploitation of rural slaves. To prevent them from escaping and to spur higher production, owners entered into arrangements with their slaves, promising eventual freedom in return for many years' hard work. The Price of Freedom reveals how blacks played a critical role in freeing themselves from slavery. Yet it was an imperfect victory. Once Baltimore's economic growth began to slow, freed blacks were virtually excluded from craft apprenticeships, and European immigrants supplanted them as a trained labor force.