Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution
A celebrated triumph of historiography, Rockdale tells the story of the Industrial Revolution as it was experienced by the men, women, and children of the cotton-manufacturing town of Rockdale, Pennsylvania. The lives of workers, managers, inventors, owners, and entrepreneurs are brilliantly illuminated by Anthony F. C. Wallace, who also describes the complex technology that governed all of Rockdale’s townspeople. Wallace examines the new relationships between employer and employee as work...
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A celebrated triumph of historiography, Rockdale tells the story of the Industrial Revolution as it was experienced by the men, women, and children of the cotton-manufacturing town of Rockdale, Pennsylvania. The lives of workers, managers, inventors, owners, and entrepreneurs are brilliantly illuminated by Anthony F. C. Wallace, who also describes the complex technology that governed all of Rockdale’s townspeople. Wallace examines the new relationships between employer and employee as work and workers moved out of the fields into the closed-in world of the spinning mule, the power loom, and the mill office. He brings to light the impassioned battle for the soul of the mill worker, a struggle between the exponents of the Enlightenment and Utopian Socialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ultimately triumphant champions of evangelical Christianity.
Pt. 1Rockdale in 1850 : the climax of a way lifeCh. ISweet, quiet Rockdale3Ch. IIA town of mules and widows33Pt. 2Rockdale from 1825 to 1835 : the creating of a way of lifeCh. IIIThe assembling of the industrialists73Ch. IVThe machines, their operatives, and the fabrics124Ch. VThe inventors of the machines186Pt. 3Rockdale from 1835 to 1850 : the struggle for control of a way of lifeCh. VIThe enlightenment's last campaign243Ch. VIIThe evangelical counterattack296Ch. VIIIThe emergence of Christian industrialism350Pt. 4Rockdale from 1850 to 1865 : the transcending of a way of lifeCh. IXMarching to millennium401AppParadigmatic processes in culture change477
\ New York Times Book Review“Extraordinary and brilliant. . . . Rockdale has the dimensions of an important event in American historical writing. It is not only a splendid reconstruction of the past . . . [b]ut a powerful interpretive reading that reconceives the very basis for the study of American industrialization. . . . A book of epic proportions.”—New York Times Book Review\ \
