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.
"The original research presented here focuses on the experience of the Pennsylvania militia formations established and evolving over the course of the French and Indian War, and during the subsequent years of Pontiacs War, from 1754 to 1765. In particular, the Black Boys Uprising of 1765 in the Conococheague Region of Pennsylvania serves as the index case, the first time American militiamen successfully defeated British regulars by employing adaptive hybrid tactics combined with accurate long-range rifle fires. This event demonstrates the means by which American militia might achieve tactical parity with British regulars." [Clark Summers in his review of the book, https://digitalcommons.salve.edu/dissertations/AAI10982011/]
"As the confederates advance into Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg Campaign, a group of Franklin & Marshall College students follow Robert Nevin, their former professor of Greek, into the army, forming Lancaster County’s only Civil War artillery battery – Independent Battery I, Pennsylvania Light Artillery. Join the men of Independent Battery I as they await the enemy at the Susquehanna River, and at the threatened state capital of Harrisburg. Learn of the experiences in Philadelphia where they expect to quell draft riots, and follow them as they serve at Harpers Ferry in ‘ironclad’ railcars on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and build fortifications on Maryland Heights. March with the men as they are sent to the defenses of Washington DC. Join them as they experience Confederate General Jubal Early’s attack on the city, debate the issues of the 1864 elections, and witness Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, as well as the Grand Review.†[from the publisher]
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.