Constant Turmoil
The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth-Century New England
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10035800 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Howell John Harris (Durham University, corresponding author), Mary H Blewett (Durham University) |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 88 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1524 |
| Publication date | 2002-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2700650 |
| OpenAlex | W2079073179 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
Mary H. Blewett, well established as a historian of labor and gender in New England history, has written a large book that continues her career-long exploration of these themes. She herself calls it, I presume affectionately, “the monster.” The book weighs in at about 1.1 kilograms, or 21⁄2 pounds, and is 521 densely packed pages long, including 80 pages of endnotes and an index. There are probably nearer a quarter of a million than two hundred thousand words in this book. What are they about, are they all necessary, and what do they add up to? In essence, this is a book about the labor history of Fall River, Massachusetts, from the antebellum beginnings of its textile industry through the 1900s. Most of it is very conventional, indeed decidedly old-fashioned, labor history—a surface narrative of strikes (mostly unsuccessful), union building (ditto), and local political campaigns (the same), which at least has the merit of giving the lie to any notion that class relations in industrializing America were conflict-free, supposing that that were still necessary. Principal sources are local newspapers, which have been read very diligently—indeed, the tired reader may wonder whether any of Blewett's surely thousands of noted items were omitted from her text, however irrelevant or merely repetitive they may have been. There is a lot of spatchcocked précis here and much extended quotation. Blewett does not seem to have known when to stop, and her readers and editors did not tell her. On top of this turgid narrative with a cast of thousands there is an equally unexciting extended literature review, in which Blewett offers a series of capsule summaries and criticisms of the works of a host of scholars that she thinks relevant to her concerns. Her comments are occasionally well made, but most of them seem to content themselves with saying that, on the basis of the Fall River experience, Professor X was or was not right. Finally, there is a concern with gender, its meanings and social construction, which Blewett finds everywhere in the discourse of her actors
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| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,3 |
| Citation span | 2006 - 2019 (14) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |