Anne Kelly Knowles – författare

Anne Kelly Knowles traces a community of Welsh immigrants to Jackson and Gallia counties in southern Ohio. After reconstructing the gradual process of community-building, the author focuses on the pivotal moment when the immigrants became involved with the industrialization of their new region as workers and investors in Welsh-owned charcoal iron companies. The text sets the southern Ohio Welsh in the context of Welsh immigration as a whole from 1795 to 1850 and explores how these strict Calvinists responded to the moral dilemmas posed by leaving their native land and experiencing economic success in the United States. A wide variety of sources, including obituaries and community histories are drawn upon to reconstruct the personal histories of over 1700 immigrants.

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 American 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 high-lights the challenges a young nation faced as it grappled with its geographic conditions.