Hagley History Hangout Hagley Museum and Library

While it is often assumed that early industrialization was a spatially and socially concentrated phenomenon, associated primarily with white capitalists in the northwestern and northeastern corners of Europe and North America respectively, the historical reality was much more complex, and more interesting. While Britain and New England played significant roles in the global textile industry, they did so within the context of a wider world of rapidly circulating ideas, people, and technologies.

As part of his dissertation research, Hunter Moskowitz, PhD candidate at Northeastern University, adds to the richness and texture of our understanding of industrialization in general and the textile industry in particular. Moskowitz takes a comparative, transnational approach, using case studies of Lowell, Massachusetts, Concord, North Carolina, and Monterrey, Mexico to uncover the circulation and contestation of techniques, personnel, and social attitudes around the world.

In support of his research, Moskowitz received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. For more Hagley History Hangouts, and more information on our funding opportunities, visit us online at hagley.org.

In this episode, Ben Spohn Interviews Kevin Kenny on his book Making Sense of the Molly Maguires which recently had a special 25th anniversary release. The Molly Maguires were a secret organization operating in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region during a period of labor unrest in the 1860s and 1870s. This period culminated in the execution of twenty suspected members of the Molly Maguires executed for the murder of sixteen men during this period. Since then there has been disagreement, over who the Molly Maguire’s were, what they did, and their motivations. Kenny argues that this is an inadequate understanding of the Molly Maguires and points out that most of the histories describing the Molly Maguires in this light, as some sort of sinister, secret organization were written by their detractors.

Kenny’s work offers a new explanation of the Molly Maguires drawing from American and Irish sources and traces the labor unrest in the pattern of the Molly Maguires back to similar groups in Ireland that operated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Keeping that in mind, Kenny’s work is a history of labor and immigration in America. While there is no denying the Molly Maguire’s involvement in violent labor unrest, this adds context to their motivations and provides an explanation for why they embraced the methods of protest that they did.

Kevin Kenny is the Glucksman Professor of History and Director of Glucksman Ireland House at NYU. For some of his research Kenny consulted the Reading Company records at Hagley, which included material related to James McParland’s investigation of the Molly Maguires and other materials related to the Molly Maguire trials.

In support of his work, Kenny received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. For more information on our funding opportunities, and more Hagley History Hangouts, visit us online at hagley.org.

In this episode Roger Horowitz interviews Vilja Hulden (University of Colorado-Boulder) about her new book, The Bosses' Union: How Employers Organized to Fight Labor before the New Deal. Her book explores how business organizations, especially the National Association of Manufacturers, sought to weaken labor unions in the first quarter of the 20th century. Inventing the term closed shop, employers mounted what they called an open-shop campaign to undermine union demands that workers at unionized workplaces join the union and thereby depict labor as tyrannical and anti-democratic. These efforts continued through the 1910s and especially following the First World War. Over time employer organizations developed more nuanced strategies and publicity methods than in the early days of the century, but their inveterate opposition to organized labor persisted underneath. Hulden especially shows how the attacks on the closed shop formed the centerpiece of NAM’s anti-union strategy throughout.

The book is available for a free download on the University of Illinois site. The link to the book page is https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p086922.

For more Hagley History Hangouts, and more information on the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library, visit us online at hagley.org.

The self-employed have many motivations for choosing or accepting their working arrangements. A business model that taps into the desire for people to “work for themselves” can mobilize the capital, networks, and labor of large numbers of people at comparatively low cost. Whether through franchising, direct-selling, or other methods, major firms became enablers, advocates, and beneficiaries of self-employment.

The latest research by Dr. Amy Edwards, senior lecturer at the University of Bristol, focuses on the tangle of personal and corporate interests around self-employment. While the top-down element of the franchise or direct-sales relationship is evident, the personal motives of the self-employed franchisee or direct-sales representative could make the arrangement mutually profitable. Bringing her family’s story into conversation with archival materials, including the Avon collection at the Hagley Library, Edwards explores the cultural as well as political and economic aspects of self-employment in late twentieth-century Britain.

In support of her work, Dr. Edwards received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Tehcnology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. For more information and more Hagley History Hangouts visit us online at hagley.org

Nitrogen is the most abundant element in the Earth’s atmosphere, it is essential to life and biological processes, and yet it is virtually impossible to access nitrogen absent the mediation of something or someone that can “fix” gaseous atmospheric nitrogen into a stable form. Historically, these mediators were biological organisms, such as cyanobacteria, that can fix nitrogen and make it available in the ecosystem and economy. Not until the advent of modern chemistry and chemical industries did a method for synthetically fixing nitrogen exist, but once developed, it became an essential component of the human economies of agriculture and warfare.

In his latest research, Chris Morris, professor of history at the University of Texas – Arlington, explores the long history of nitrogen, from the guano islands of Peru to its modern re-creation as an industrially-produced, globally-traded commodity. Using Hagley Library collections including the DuPont Company archives, Morris reveals a hidden history that connects sharecroppers in Alabama, soldiers on World War battlefields, chemists in laboratories, and diplomats in world capitals.

In support of his work, Morris received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. For more information and more Hagley History Hangouts, visit us online at hagley.org.

When miners go underground, they enter a spiritual realm distinct from that aboveground. Across time, places, and cultures, miners have made religious observance part of their work, building shrines, making offerings, and naming places after sacred personages. What connects these practices, and how can we access the meaning behind them?

The latest research of Rebecca Janzen, professor of Spanish and comparative literature at the University of South Carolina, addresses this cultural phenomenon as it has been manifested by miners in the Americas from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Studying cases in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and others, Janzen pulls together numerous kinds of sources, including church documents, public records, and corporate archives such as the Bethlehem Steel collection held at the Hagley Library. Janzen offers us a glimpse underground and into the hearts of miners and mining communities.

In support of her work Dr. Janzen received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. For more information on our funding opportunities, and for more Hagley History Hangouts, visit us online at hagley.org.