Household TO FACTORY

Summary of the Author's Argument



Historian Bruce Laurie has written extensively about labor history in the United States. In Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America he explores the ways in which industrialization in the 1800s transformed skilled artisans into wage earners with little, if any, control over the terms and conditions of their work. Reviewing the book in Labor Studies Journal, John L. Revitte observed that Laurie "skillfully portrays the factories, machines, and shift in ownership to isolate corporations shattering customs and artisans' dreams of escaping wage-worker status." Laurie discusses the roles of unions, immigration, and slave and ...