Thesis ID: CBB001567526

A Place of Work: The Geography of an Early Nineteenth Century Machine Shop (2013)

unapi

Unger, David Stephen (Author)


Harvard University
Galison, Peter L.
Smith, Merrit Roe
Smith, Merrit Roe
Voskuhl, Adelheid Clara
Voskuhl, Adelheid Clara


Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Advisor: Galison, Peter L; Committee Members: Smith, Merrit Roe, Voskuhl, Adelheid Clara.
Physical Details: 228 pp.
Language: English

Between 1813-1825 the Boston Manufacturing Company built a textile factory in Waltham, Massachusetts. Their factory is known for many important firsts in American industry, including the first commercially viable power loom, one of the first vertically integrated factories, and one of the first join stock financed manufacturing concerns. This successful factory became the direct model for the large textile mills built along the Merrimack River and elsewhere, iconic locations of American post-colonial industrialization. This dissertation looks at the early development and success of the Boston Manufacturing Company from a geographical perspective. It argues that in order build a successful factory, the company, its managers, and its workers, had to transform their "place": a notion that I investigate from an economic-geographical and anthropological point of view, moving from site, to landscape, to geographic networks. On these grounds, I show how the logic of the factory's development was both embedded in and shaping the emerging structures surrounding it, and how, in turn, the company's later move to Lowell as one of the iconic industrial sites depended on its having successfully learned the business of "place-making" in its foundational Waltham decade.

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 74/10(E), Apr 2014. Proquest Document ID: 1417073183.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567526/

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Authors & Contributors
Guy, Stéphane
Yagou, Artemis
Johnson, Walter
Francks, Penelope
Berg, Maxine
Tuchman, Arleen Marcia
Concepts
Economics
Industrialization
Biographies
Technology and culture
Transportation
Science and society
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
20th century, early
21st century
17th century
Places
United States
Boston (Massachusetts, U.S.)
Europe
Philadelphia, PA
England
Virginia (U.S.)
Institutions
East India Company (English)
Harvard University
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