The Machine in America

The Machine in America
Author: Carroll Pursell
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2007-03-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0801885787

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From the medieval farm implements used by the first colonists to the invisible links of the Internet, the history of technology in America is a history of society as well. This title analyzes technology's impact on the lives of women and men. It also discusses the innovation of an American system of manufactures.

Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics

Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics
Author: Terry Golway
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2014-03-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0871407922

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“Golway’s revisionist take is a useful reminder of the unmatched ingenuity of American politics.”—Wall Street Journal History casts Tammany Hall as shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft and patronage personified by notoriously crooked characters. In his groundbreaking work Machine Made, journalist and historian Terry Golway dismantles these stereotypes, focusing on the many benefits of machine politics for marginalized immigrants. As thousands sought refuge from Ireland’s potato famine, the very question of who would be included under the protection of American democracy was at stake. Tammany’s transactional politics were at the heart of crucial social reforms—such as child labor laws, workers’ compensation, and minimum wages— and Golway demonstrates that American political history cannot be understood without Tammany’s profound contribution. Culminating in FDR’s New Deal, Machine Made reveals how Tammany Hall “changed the role of government—for the better to millions of disenfranchised recent American arrivals” (New York Observer).

Civilizing the Machine

Civilizing the Machine
Author: John F. Kasson
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1999-05-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0809016206

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A major theme in American history has been the desire to achieve a genuinely republican way of life that values liberty, order, and virtue. This work shows us how new technologies affected this drive for a republican civilization - a question as vital now as ever.

When the Machine Stopped

When the Machine Stopped
Author: Max Holland
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1989
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

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American Dream Machine

American Dream Machine
Author: Matthew Specktor
Publisher: Tin House Books
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2014-04-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1935639455

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The story of two talent agents and their three troubled boys, heirs to Hollywood royalty; a sweeping narrative about fathers and sons, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood and, by extension, American life. American Dream Machine is the story of an iconic striver, a classic self-made man in the vein of Jay Gatsby or Augie March. It's the story of a talent agent and his troubled sons, two generations of Hollywood royalty. It's a sweeping narrative about parents and children, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood, and by extension, American life. Beau Rosenwald—overweight, not particularly handsome, and improbably charismatic—arrives in Los Angeles in 1962 with nothing but an ill-fitting suit and a pair of expensive brogues. By the late 1970s he has helped found the most successful agency in Hollywood. Through the eyes of his son, we watch Beau and his partner go to war, waging a seismic battle that redraws the lines of an entire industry. We watch Beau rise and fall and rise again, in accordance with the cultural transformations that dictate the fickle world of movies. We watch Beau's partner, the enigmatic and cerebral Williams Farquarsen, struggle to contain himself, to control his impulses and consolidate his power. And we watch two generations of men fumble and thrive across the LA landscape, learning for themselves the shadows and costs exacted by success and failure. Mammalian, funny, and filled with characters both vital and profound, American Dream Machine is a piercing interrogation of the role—nourishing, as well as destructive—that illusion plays in all our lives.

The Deportation Machine

The Deportation Machine
Author: Adam Goodman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691204209

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"By most accounts, the United States has deported around five million people since 1882-but this includes only what the federal government calls "formal deportations." "Voluntary departures," where undocumented immigrants who have been detained agree to leave within a specified time period, and "self-deportations," where undocumented immigrants leave because legal structures in the United States have made their lives too difficult and frightening, together constitute 90% of the undocumented immigrants who have been expelled by the federal government. This brings the number of deportees to fifty-six million. These forms of deportation rely on threats and coercion created at the federal, state, and local levels, using large-scale publicity campaigns, the fear of immigration raids, and detentions to cost-effectively push people out of the country. Here, Adam Goodman traces a comprehensive history of American deportation policies from 1882 to the present and near future. He shows that ome of the country's largest deportation operations expelled hundreds of thousands of people almost exclusively through the use of voluntary departures and through carefully-planned fear campaigns that terrified undocumented immigrants through newspaper, radio, and television publicity. These deportation efforts have disproportionately targeted Mexican immigrants, who make up half of non-citizens but 90% of deportees. Goodman examines the political economy of these deportation operations, arguing that they run on private transportation companies, corrupt public-private relations, and the creation of fear-based internal borders for long-term undocumented residents. He grounds his conclusions in over four years of research in English- and Spanish-language archives and twenty-five oral histories conducted with both immigration officials and immigrants-revealing for the first time the true magnitude and deep historical roots of anti-immigrant policy in the United Statesws that s

The Machine in America

The Machine in America
Author: Professor Carroll Pursell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 358
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801848179

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From the medieval farm implements brought by the first colonists to the invisible links of the Internet, the history of technology in America is a history of our society as well. Arguing that "the tools and processes we use are a part of our lives, not simply instruments of our purpose," historian Carroll Pursell analyzes technology's impact upon the lives of women and men, their work, politics, and social relationships--and in turn, their influence upon technological development. Pursell shows how both the idea of progress and the mechanical means to harness the forces of nature developed and changed as they were brought from the Old World to the New. He describes the ways in which American industrial and agricultural technology began to take on a distinctive shape as it adapted and extended the technical base of the industrial revolution. He discusses the innovation of an American System of Manufactures and the mechanization of agriculture; new systems of mining, lumbering, and farming, which helped conquer and define the West; and the technologies that shaped the rise of cities. And he shows how the export of technology helped to foster American hegemony both in theWestern Hemisphere and elsewhere in the world. Pursell also argues that American technology has created a social hegemony, not only over the way we live but also over how we evaluate that life. He shows that such developments as scientific management techniques and industrial research changed Americans' lives as much as the mass production of such durable consumer goods as radios and automobiles. In many ways, he concludes, today's military-industrial complex is the legacy of the intense cooperation betweenscience and technology during World War II.

Minding the Machine

Minding the Machine
Author: Stephen P. Rice
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2004-08-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520227816

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"Minding the Machine is an illuminating contribution to our understanding of antebellum mechanization and the origins of the modern middle class. Carefully focusing on key antebellum discussions of mechanical knowledge, training, control, opportunity, bodily and mental health, Rice convincingly shows how deeply these were pervaded by conceptions of social and class authority."—John F. Kasson, author of Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century "Stephen Rice has brought provocative questions and fresh research to bear on that vexed topic-the origins of the American middle class. Using the increased mechanization of production during the antebellum decades as his focus, he has provided a fascinating picture of workplace changes and the cultural responses they elicited."—Joyce Appleby, author of Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans "Rice's book explores the intellectual processes by which the emerging middle class in antebellum America strove to understand and control the new industrial order, mapping class relations onto less contested social and technical terrain. Within strange and unusual places and movements seemingly removed from the center of workplace change and conflict—such as health reform and the creation of chess playing automatons—crucial questions of power and authority were debated."—David Zonderman, author of Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850

Swinging the Machine

Swinging the Machine
Author: Joel Dinerstein
Publisher:
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

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An innovative study of the influence of black popular culture on modern American life; In any age and any given society, cultural practices reflect the material circumstances of people's everyday lives. According to Joel Dinerstein, it was no different in America between the two World Wars - an era sometimes known as the machine age - when innovative forms of music and dance helped a newly urbanized population cope with the increased mechanization of modern life. Grand spectacles such as the Ziegfield Follies and the movies of Busby Berkeley captured the American ethos of mass production, with chorus girls as the cogs of these fast, flowing pleasure vehicles. Yet it was African American culture, Dinerstein argues, that ultimately provided the means of aesthetic adaptation to the accelerated tempo of modernity. Drawing on a legacy of engagement with and resistance to technological change, with deep roots in West African dance and music, black artists developed new cultural forms that sought to humanize machines. In The Ballad of John Henry, the epic toast Shine, and countless blues songs, African Americans first addressed the challenge of industrialization. Jazz musicians drew

Killing Machine

Killing Machine
Author: Lloyd C. Gardner
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2013-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1595589430

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With Obama's election to the presidency in 2008, many believed the United States had entered a new era: Obama came into office with high expectations that he would end the war in Iraq and initiate a new foreign policy that would reestablish American values and the United States' leadership role in the world. In this shattering new assessment, historian Lloyd C. Gardner argues that, despite cosmetic changes, Obama has simply built on the expanding power base of presidential power that reaches back across decades and through multiple administrations. The new president ended the “enhanced interrogation” policy of the Bush administration but did not abandon the concept of preemption. Obama withdrew from Iraq but has institutionalized drone warfare—including the White House's central role in selecting targets. What has come into view, Gardner argues, is the new face of American presidential power: high–tech, secretive, global, and lethal. Killing Machine skillfully narrates the drawdown in Iraq, the counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan, the rise of the use of drones, and targeted assassinations from al-Awlaki to Bin Laden—drawing from the words of key players in these actions as well as their major public critics. With unparalleled historical perspective, Gardner's book is the new touchstone for understanding not only the Obama administration but the American presidency itself.