Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution

By Anthony F.C. Wallace

Book Overview

A celebrated triumph of historiography, Rockdale tells the story of the Industrial Revolution as it was experienced by the men, women, and children of the cotton-manufacturing town of Rockdale, Pennsylvania. The lives of workers, managers, inventors, owners, and entrepreneurs are brilliantly illuminated by Anthony F. C. Wallace, who also describes the complex technology that governed all of Rockdale's townspeople. Wallace examines the new relationships between employer and employee as work and workers moved out of the fields into the closed-in world of the spinning mule, the power loom, and the mill office. He brings to light the impassioned battle for the soul of the mill worker, a struggle between the exponents of the Enlightenment and Utopian Socialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ultimately triumphant champions of evangelical Christianity.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803298536
• ISBN13: 9780803298538
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 554 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.2" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Nice intimate view of my neighborhood

Living west of Philadelphia, you get a sense of history just seeing old mill remnants and stone homes. This lets you see how they got there. My side of Aston, PA is the site of all this going on, people, mills, economics, religion. Neat book.