A look at the role of state policies in North-South economic divergence and in American industrial development leading up to the Civil War. In 1796, famed engineer and architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe toured the coal fields outside Richmond, Virginia, declaring enthusiastically, “Such a mine of Wealth exists, I believe, nowhere else!” With its abundant and accessible deposits, growing industries, and network of rivers and ports, Virginia stood poised to serve as the center of the young nation’s coal trade. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Virginia’s leadership in the American coal industry had completely unraveled while Pennsylvania, at first slow to exploit its vast reserves of anthracite and bituminous coal, had become the country’s leading producer. Sean Patrick Adams compares the political economies of coal in Virginia and Pennsylvania from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, examining the divergent paths these two states took in developing their ample coal reserves during a critical period of American industrialization. In both cases, Adams finds, state economic policies played a major role. Virginia’s failure to exploit the rich coal fields in the western part of the state can be traced to the legislature’s overriding concern to protect and promote the interests of the agrarian, slaveholding elite of eastern Virginia. Pennsylvania’s more factious legislature enthusiastically embraced a policy of economic growth that resulted in the construction of an extensive transportation network, a statewide geological survey, and support for private investment in its coal fields. Using coal as a barometer of economic change, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth addresses longstanding questions about North-South economic divergence and the role of state government in American industrial development.
With this book, the historians Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade collaborate to provide a comprehensive, accessible, one-volume history of Virginia, the first of its kind since the 1970s.
O.M. Kerr, Illustrated Treasury of the American Locomotive Company (Alburg, VT: Delta, 1980), 9; Power Wagon 104 (July 1, 1913): 72; Times-Dispatch, August 23, 1913. 386. Albert J. Churella, From Steam to Diesel: Managerial Customs and ...
During the winter of1805 theprice ofoakwood in Philadelphia shotupto twelve dollarsa cord—more than double its price earlier the same year.The American Daily Advertiser reported that onefamily, “having expended alltheir wood,was ...
The region along Deep River in central North Carolina once boasted a small but significant coal mining industry that from the early 1800s to the end of the 20th century provided fuel for manufacturing and domestic use.
This perspective allows a unique view of the development of an industrial society not just from the ground up but from the hearth up.
This multidisciplinary collection of essays argues not only that capitalism reached far beyond the purview of the economy, but also that the revolution was not confined to the destruction of an agrarian past.
... Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind (Norman, 2015), on the fears of pan-Indian “conspiracies” that led white officials to isolate and coerce the TransAppalachian Indian nations.
"This work was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Policy History (vol. 18, no. 1, 2006)"--T.p. verso.
At the heart of the story are the diverse people who lived and worked in the district—whether operator or miner, management or labor, union or nonunion, white or black, immigrant or native—who left a legacy for posterity now captured in ...
... Landfall along the Chesapeake: In the Wake of Captain John Smith (2006); Camilla Townsend, Poca- hontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: An American Portrait (2004); Alden T. Vaughan, American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of ...