“Blurring the boundary between exploiting trees and exploiting workers, <i>Cutover Capitalism</i> is an interesting re-interpretation of the field of forest history, a discipline that has focused all too heavily on woods technology and not enough on labor process.” — Richard Judd, author of <i>Second Nature: An Environmental History of New England</i>

What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did these communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest provides a new perspective on the process of industrialization in America through the study of rural workers in a cutover landscape.  Back when resources started running scarce, the environment of the forest and bodies of workers became the natural resources from which mills and landowners extracted. Bodies and cutover landscapes were mobilized in new ways to increase the scale and efficiency of production—a brutal process for workers, human and animal alike. In the Northern Forest, an industrial working class formed in relation to the unique ways that workers' bodies were used to produce value and in relation to the seasonal cycles of the forest environment.Cutover Capitalism is an innovative historical study that combines methodological approaches from labor history, environmental history, and the new history of capitalism. The book tells a character-driven yet theoretically sophisticated story about what it was like to live through this process of industrialization.
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What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? How did these communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? This book provides a new perspective on the process of industrialization through the study of rural workers in a cutover landscape.
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List of photographs, maps, tables, charts, or other illustrative materials Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Work of Trees 2.  Common Labor, Common Lands 3. A Chance Interlude: Organic Networks 4. The Winter Workscape: Industrializing with Ice 5. The Body as Cheap Nature 6. The Lumberjack Problem 7. Half-Wild Folk Epilogue: Land, Labor, and Local History Bibliography Endnotes
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781959000297
Publisert
2024-10-01
Utgiver
Vendor
West Virginia University Press
Vekt
454 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
304

Biographical note

Jason L. Newton, PhD is an historian of modern America specializing in the history of capitalism, labor, and the environment. He is currently an assistant teaching professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.