Company Towns in the Americas

Company Towns in the Americas PDF Author: Oliver J. Dinius
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820337555
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Company towns were the spatial manifestation of a social ideology and an economic rationale. The contributors to this volume show how national politics, social protest, and local culture transformed those founding ideologies by examining the histories of company towns in six countries: Argentina (Firmat), Brazil (Volta Redonda, Santos, Fordlândia), Canada (Sudbury), Chile (El Salvador), Mexico (Santa Rosa, Río Blanco), and the United States (Anaconda, Kellogg, and Sunflower City). Company towns across the Americas played similar economic and social roles. They advanced the frontiers of industrial capitalism and became powerful symbols of modernity. They expanded national economies by supporting extractive industries on thinly settled frontiers and, as a result, brought more land, natural resources, and people under the control of corporations. U.S. multinational companies exported ideas about work discipline, race, and gender to Latin America as they established company towns there to extend their economic reach. Employers indeed shaped social relations in these company towns through education, welfare, and leisure programs, but these essays also show how working-class communities reshaped these programs to serve their needs. The editors’ introduction and a theoretical essay by labor geographer Andrew Herod provide the context for the case studies and illuminate how the company town serves as a window into both the comparative and transnational histories of labor under industrial capitalism.

Company Towns in the Americas

Company Towns in the Americas PDF Author: Oliver J. Dinius
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820337555
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Company towns were the spatial manifestation of a social ideology and an economic rationale. The contributors to this volume show how national politics, social protest, and local culture transformed those founding ideologies by examining the histories of company towns in six countries: Argentina (Firmat), Brazil (Volta Redonda, Santos, Fordlândia), Canada (Sudbury), Chile (El Salvador), Mexico (Santa Rosa, Río Blanco), and the United States (Anaconda, Kellogg, and Sunflower City). Company towns across the Americas played similar economic and social roles. They advanced the frontiers of industrial capitalism and became powerful symbols of modernity. They expanded national economies by supporting extractive industries on thinly settled frontiers and, as a result, brought more land, natural resources, and people under the control of corporations. U.S. multinational companies exported ideas about work discipline, race, and gender to Latin America as they established company towns there to extend their economic reach. Employers indeed shaped social relations in these company towns through education, welfare, and leisure programs, but these essays also show how working-class communities reshaped these programs to serve their needs. The editors’ introduction and a theoretical essay by labor geographer Andrew Herod provide the context for the case studies and illuminate how the company town serves as a window into both the comparative and transnational histories of labor under industrial capitalism.

The Company Town

The Company Town PDF Author: Hardy Green
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459618815
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Examines how towns across the United States have grown thanks to the existence of one large business being run from the community, discusses how those single-business communities have influenced the American economy, and explores the benefits and consequences of these towns.

Building the Workingman's Paradise

Building the Workingman's Paradise PDF Author: Margaret Crawford
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860914211
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This innovative and absorbing book surveys a little known chapter in the story of American urbanism—the history of communities built and owned by single companies seeking to bring their workers' homes and place of employment together on a single site. By 1930 more than two million people lived in such towns, dotted across an industrial frontier which stretched from Lowell, Massachusetts, through Torrance, California to Norris, Tennessee. Margaret Crawford focuses on the transformation of company town construction from the vernacular settlements of the late eighteenth century to the professional designs of architects and planners one hundred and fifty years later. Eschewing a static architectural approach which reads politics, history, and economics through the appearance of buildings, Crawford portrays the successive forms of company towns as the product of a dynamic process, shaped by industrial transformation, class struggle, and reformers' efforts to control and direct these forces.

Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest

Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest PDF Author: Linda Carlson
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295742925
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
“Company town.” The words evoke images of rough-and-tumble loggers and gritty miners, of dreary shacks in isolated villages, of wages paid in scrip good only at price-gouging company stores of paternalistic employers. But these stereotypes are outdated, especially for those company towns that flourished well into the twentieth century. This new edition updates the status of the surviving towns and how they have changed in the fifteen years since the original edition, and what new life has been created on the sites of the ones that were razed. In the preface, Linda Carlson reflects on how wonderful it has been to meet people who lived in these towns, or had parents who did, and to hear about their memorable experiences.

Company Towns

Company Towns PDF Author: Neil White
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442695773
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Company towns are often portrayed as powerless communities, fundamentally dependent on the outside influence of global capital. Neil White challenges this interpretation by exploring how these communities were altered at the local level through human agency, missteps, and chance. Far from being homogeneous, these company towns are shown to be unique communities with equally unique histories. Company Towns provides a multi-layered, international comparison between the development of two settlements—the mining community of Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia, and the mill town of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada. White pinpoints crucial differences between the towns' experiences by contrasting each region's histories from various perspectives—business, urban, labour, civic, and socio-cultural. Company Towns also makes use of a sizable collection of previously neglected oral history sources and town records, providing an illuminating portrait of divergence that defies efforts to impose structure on the company town phenomenon.

Our Towns

Our Towns PDF Author: James Fallows
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101871857
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
NATIONAL BEST SELLER • The basis for the HBO documentary now streaming on HBO Max For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.

The Company Town in the American West

The Company Town in the American West PDF Author: James B. Allen
Publisher: Norman, University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN:
Category : Company towns
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description


Coal Towns

Coal Towns PDF Author: Crandall A. Shifflett
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870498855
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Using oral histories, company records, and census data, Crandall A. Shifflett paints a vivid portrait of miners and their families in southern Appalachian coal towns from the late nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century. He finds that, compared to their earlier lives on subsistence farms, coal-town life was not all bad. Shifflett examines how this view, quite common among the oral histories of these working families, has been obscured by the middle-class biases of government studies and the Edenic myth of preindustrial Appalachia propagated by some historians. From their own point of view, mining families left behind a life of hard labor and drafty weatherboard homes. With little time for such celebrated arts as tale-telling and quilting, preindustrial mountain people strung more beans than dulcimers. In addition, the rural population was growing, and farmland was becoming scarce. What the families recall about the coal towns contradicts the popular image of mining life. Most miners did not owe their souls to the company store, and most mining companies were not unusually harsh taskmasters. Former miners and their families remember such company benefits as indoor plumbing, regular income, and leisure activities. They also recall the United Mine Workers of America as bringing not only pay raises and health benefits but work stoppages and violent confrontations. Far from being mere victims of historical forces, miners and their families shaped their own destiny by forging a new working-class culture out of the adaptation of their rural values to the demands of industrial life. This new culture had many continuities with the older one. Out of the closely knit social ties they brought from farming communities, mining families created their own safety net for times of economic downturn. Shifflett recognizes the dangers and hardships of coal-town life but also shows the resilience of Appalachian people in adapting their culture to a new environment. Crandall A. Shifflett is an associate professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Killing for Coal

Killing for Coal PDF Author: Thomas G. Andrews
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674736680
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
This book offers a bold and original perspective on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the “Great Coalfield War.” In a story of transformation, Andrews illuminates the causes and consequences of the militancy that erupted in colliers’ strikes over the course of nearly half a century.

Mining Towns of Southern Colorado

Mining Towns of Southern Colorado PDF Author: Staci Comden
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 0738599530
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Images from the archives of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I).