The American Coal Industry 1790û1902

by Adams,Sean Patrick

• ISBN13: 9781848933750
• ISBN10: 1848933754
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-12-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

American industrial prowess was built on the availability of cheap and plentiful supplies of coal. Yet despite the importance of coal to the nineteenth-century economy there is a paucity of readily available primary resource material. This collection rectifies this by making available a selection of letters, pamphlets, industry reports and articles from newspapers and journals organized across three volumes. Sources focus on the main coal supplying regions of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois, as well as covering lesser known coalfields in Rhode Island, Virginia and California. The chronological format of the collection allows a historical narrative, showing the effects of a growing coal industry on the politics which surrounded it, on the standard of living and on the economy. Coal was important not just to the burgeoning industrial revolution in America, but also created opportunities for entrepreneurism in the early coalfields and produced economic competition against the wood supply industry for the market in domestic use. It was also the material for the first major energy transition - a developing area of current scholarship. Added context on this critical period of American industrial history is given by full editorial apparatus. The set will be of value to economic and labour historians, and those interested in the history of the United States in the long nineteenth century more generally.