Chapter: Thriving activity in a growing urban center, Lancaster's 18th century craft tradition ///The Lancaster artisan in 1819, the spectre of depression beyond the golden age /// Lancaster artisans in an industrializing society,1850 /// Changing work techniques as a key to persistence /// Cultural factors as a key to persistence /// The artisan in 1880 , adapting and surviving in a maturing industrial society
Summary
Examines how the industrial revolution affected the lives and work of artisans in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The author seeks to correct the historical assumption that the rise of the factory system brought nothing but misery and hardship by showing how Lancaster weathered the challenge successfully.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-236) and index.
African American resources at Lancaster County Historical Society.
Summary
During the revolutionary era, in the midst of the struggle for liberty from Great Britain, Americans up and down the Atlantic seaboard confronted the injustice of holding slaves. Lawmakers debated abolition, masters considered freeing their slaves, and slaves emancipated themselves by running away. But by 1800, of states south of New England, only Pennsylvania had extricated itself from slavery, the triumph, historians have argued, of Quaker moralism and the philosophy of natural rights. With exhaustive research of individual acts of freedom, slave escapes, legislative action, and anti-slavery appeals, Nash and Soderlund penetrate beneath such broad generalizations and find a more complicated process at work. Defiant runaway slaves joined Quaker abolitionists like Anthony Benezet and members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to end slavery and slave owners shrewdly calculated how to remove themselves from a morally bankrupt institution without suffering financial loss by freeing slaves as indentured servants, laborers, and cottagers.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 309-312) and index.
Contents
Chapters : Geology - "Nature's handiwork on display" / Economic Development - "A race for the river!" / Logging - "The trees came down like tall grass" / Floods - "We are going to try to beat the river" / Pollution - "A trifling inconvenience" / Nuclear Development - "There is absolutely no danger" / Farming - "Stewards of this garden" / Shad Restoration - "You can't be half-hearted" / The River and the Bay - "A long-term investment"
Summary
"Stranahan tells the sweeping story of one of America's great rivers - ranging in time from the Susquehanna's geologic origins to the modern threats to its ecosystem, describing human settlements, industry and pollution, and recent efforts to save the river and its "drowned estuary", the Chesapeake Bay. The result is a unique natural history of the vast Susquehanna watershed and a compelling look at environmental issues of national importance. Stranahan's vivid account of her experiences on the Susquehanna, including interviews with the colorful and engaging people she met along its shores, captures the river's continuing ability to fire the imagination, to stir the senses, to inspire dreams.Stranahan describes how canal builders, loggers, miners, and industrialists nearly destroyed the source of their wealth. And she tells of the river's frequent retaliation with historic, rampaging floods. Today, the Susquehanna is a study in contrasts: clean and healthy again along much of its length, in a few places still so polluted that nothing can survive. New threats from urbanization, modern agriculture, and nuclear power make the future uncertain. But Stranahan finds reasons for optimism." [from Goodreads]
