Judith A. McGaw – författare

On a visit to a Berkshire paper mill, the narrator of Herman Melville's "The Tartarus of Maids" views the "wonderful" papermaking machine with awe and calls it a "miracle of inscrutable intricacy." Manifesting in their factories and towns such nineteenth-century fascination with machinery, paper mill owners and workers made an industrial revolution in Berkshrie County, Massachusetts. This book examines their experiences from the era of craft production through several generations of sustained technological change to answer two major questions: What accounts for the widespread and rapid adoption of machines in nineteenth-century America? And how did the new technology help to transform America socially and culturally? Rejecting technological determinism, Judith McGaw effectively integrates labor, business, social, and women's history with technological history to bring to life the human decisions that made mechanization possible. In compelling detail the author offers new explanations of how change in the craft era paved the way for industrialization and how paternalism worked in small-scale industry. She also provides a thoughtful discussion of the interaction between evangelical culture and the emerging industrial order, and a close analysis of how nineteenth-century gender distinctions fostered mechanization.Judith A. McGaw is Assistant Professor of History of Technology at the University of Pennsylvania.Originally published in 1987.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

On a visit to a Berkshire paper mill, the narrator of Herman Melville's "The Tartarus of Maids" views the "wonderful" papermaking machine with awe and calls it a "miracle of inscrutable intricacy." Manifesting in their factories and towns such nineteenth-century fascination with machinery, paper mill owners and workers made an industrial revolution in Berkshrie County, Massachusetts. This book examines their experiences from the era of craft production through several generations of sustained technological change to answer two major questions: What accounts for the widespread and rapid adoption of machines in nineteenth-century America? And how did the new technology help to transform America socially and culturally? Rejecting technological determinism, Judith McGaw effectively integrates labor, business, social, and women's history with technological history to bring to life the human decisions that made mechanization possible. In compelling detail the author offers new explanations of how change in the craft era paved the way for industrialization and how paternalism worked in small-scale industry. She also provides a thoughtful discussion of the interaction between evangelical culture and the emerging industrial order, and a close analysis of how nineteenth-century gender distinctions fostered mechanization.Judith A. McGaw is Assistant Professor of History of Technology at the University of Pennsylvania.Originally published in 1987.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This collection of original essays documents technology's centrality to the history of early America. Unlike much previous scholarship, this volume emphasizes the quotidian rather than the exceptional: the farm household seeking to preserve food or acquire tools, the surveyor balancing economic and technical considerations while laying out a turnpike, the woman of child-bearing age employing herbal contraceptives, and the neighbors of a polluted urban stream debating issues of property, odor, and health. These cases and others drawn from brewing, mining, farming, and woodworking enable the authors to address recent historiographic concerns, including the environmental aspects of technological change and the gendered nature of technical knowledge. Brooke Hindle's classic 1966 essay on early American technology is also reprinted, and his view of the field is reassessed. A bibliographical essay and summary of Hindle's bibliographic findings conclude the volume. The contributors are Judith A. McGaw, Robert C. Post, Susan E. Klepp, Michal McMahon, Patrick W. O'Bannon, Sarah F. McMahon, Donald C. Jackson, Robert B. Gordon, Carolyn C. Cooper, and Nina E. Lerman.