Greetings Histarchers,
Stathi Pappas and I are organizing a session entitled “Made in America: The
Creation of the American Industrial Order” for the 2008 SHA Conference in
Albuquerque. In brief, our session considers the mechanisms involved in and
individual responses to early and late capitalism across the United States.
Dr. Michael Nassaney will be the session's discussant.
We are currently looking for a few more papers to add to our session and
have included a synopsis of the session's objectives below. If you think
your research fits the bill, please send an abstract and/or inquiry to
Stacey Camp at [log in to unmask] on or before June 5th, 2007.
Best wishes,
Stacey Camp (Doctoral Candidate, Stanford University) and Efstathios Pappas
(Doctoral Candidate, University of Nevada, Reno)
[log in to unmask]
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Session Title: Made in America: The Creation of the American Industrial
Order
Discussant: Dr. Michael S. Nassaney
Co-Organizers: Efstathios Pappas and Stacey Camp
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American social, economic,
and political systems became increasingly tailored to the new industrial
order. As Alan Trachtenberg noted, by the late 19th century, America’s
landscapes, places, and material culture had been transformed by
industrialization and the ideologies it required in order to organize and
maintain employees in response to labor landscapes inundated with workers
from diverse backgrounds. Conflicting value systems, differing ethnicities
and races, pre-industrial work habits, “inappropriate” gender roles, and a
lack of middle class refinement caused established elites to perceive a
profound destabilization of American society.
Industrial organizations held a great deal of power to manipulate, instruct,
and coerce their workers and families. This resulted in an ongoing encounter
where perceived American values and nationalism were co-opted by the
industrial elite and nested within industrial work places. These values were
manifested in existing managerial hierarchies, philosophies of labor, the
physical landscape, and nationalistic belief systems.
Instrumental to this shift to a corporate-run economy was the proliferation
of social ideologies that promised social and economic quality for all
American citizens. These ideologies took material forms; towns such as
Pullman, Illinois, or the more recently constructed Celebration, Florida,
owned by The Walt Disney Corporation, developed around capital and capital
often displaced underclasses and racialized ethnic groups from metropolitan
centers in the name of “urban renewal.”
The forms of industrial didacticism could be covert or overt programs
intended to reform and enculturate. These include practical job training,
housing policies, managerial bureaucracies and hierarchies, imposed social
and physical landscapes, domestic reform movements, adult education and
citizenship courses, and assimilation campaigns to “teach” newly arrived
immigrants and lower-class citizens their proper place in the workforce
hierarchy.
As workers began to feel this increasing ideological strain, they entered
into a complex negotiation with their employers. This industrial conflict
was more than a struggle between labor and capital; instead agency,
resistance, and negotiation within the complex hierarchies of American
society resulted in the creation of an entirely new American social order.
Historians have clearly documented these social transformations brought
about by industrialization – the history and locations of these reform
movements and company towns occupy a significant amount of space in academic
libraries. But we are still left with the question of how these projects
were lived and enacted in daily life. Archaeologists, who specialize in the
analysis of material culture, are in the unique position to analyze
individuals’ responses to this re-organization of American life.
This session invites papers that consider the materiality of American
industrialization and social evolution, such as examination of the spaces,
landscapes, and material culture that served to cultivate and maintain
industrial ideologies. We also welcome papers that address how these changes
were experienced by the individuals living in late 19th century America.
Possible topics include: urbanization/gentrification, landscapes of labor
(company towns, railway and mining camps, etc.), domestic reform movements
(such as the housekeeping and homemaking campaigns), corporate ideologies,
and the social segmentation of specific genders, classes, and ethnicities
into domestic or “blue-collar” particular job typologies.
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