Category: Industrial Revolution

Industrial Revolution Studies isn’t a formal program at any major university, so far as I know, but there ought to be. Over the past half century a veritable library of books and scholarly articles have been published on all facets of the subject. Scholars can’t seem to agree on anything. “The British Industrial Revolution: An…

Harvard University’s David S. Landes was the doyen of modern Industrial Revolution Studies. This book, “The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present” (1969) is a landmark in the field. The author’s arguments and theses laid out in “The Unbound Prometheus” framed the scholarly debate about the…

The Oxford University Press did a wonderful thing when it introduced the “Very Short Introduction” series in 1995. As of 2024, there are over 600 volumes in the series covering everything from Accounting to Zionism. Each is just over one hundred pages long and is usually authored by an established authority in the field. The…

Samuel Insull is almost completely forgotten today, even in Chicago where he was once one of the most prominent and wealthiest men in the city. Few have risen so high starting from a position so low. Even fewer have crashed more swiftly, completely and spectacularly. In “The Merchant of Power: Sam Insull, Thomas Edison, and…

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” So begins one of the most famous poems in American history, “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1860). Published forty-two years after the death of the great American patriot, Longfellow’s poem cemented Paul Revere’s name in American history. In the…