Forging America

Stacks of stone preside over many bucolic and wooded landscapes in the mid-Atlantic states. Initially constructed more than two hundred years ago, they housed blast furnaces that converted rock and wood into the iron that enabled the United States to...

John Bezís-Selfa is Associate Professor of History at Wheaton College.

John Bezís-Selfa's study of managers and workers in American iron industry before 1840 offers a refreshingly new perspective on a familiar subject. Quickly dispensing with matters of technology, capital investment, and business organization, the author clusters his research on some forty sites in two broadly compared regions—Pennsylvania/New Jersey and Virginia/Maryland—all devotes most of his analysis to demonstrating the social relationships of the mines, forges, and furnaces that dotted the countryside. The Rich detail from numerous account books and troves of correspondence buttresses three general arguments.

Ronald Schultz, University of Wyoming:

John Bezis-Selfa reveals the personal and cultural meaning of industrialization in the first three centuries of Anglo-American history. Focusing on iron production, iron masters, and iron workers from the seventeenth to the mid-ninteenth centuries, Bezis-Selfa recounts the story, not only of the early iron industry, but of the profound transformations that industrialization wrought in the cultural landscape of early industrial America.... This book is... more than a story of iron-making in early America; it is one of the best accounts of the cultural transformation that was American Industrialization.

In this beautifully written and engagingly argued volume, Bezís-Selfa claims that the United States was the first of the former colonies to join the developed world because of the convergence of three revolutions—one political, one industrial, and one 'industrious.'... Thoroughly researched in sources from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Forging America contributes significantly to an understanding of Colonial labor history.... Bezís-Selfa restores work and the workplace to the center of the story of what structures people's lives and shapes their identity.... Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professional collections.

Michael V. Kennedy, University of Michigan-Flint:

Forging America is well-written, informative, and stimulating. It is a challenge to historians of American economic development to dig more deeply and more broadly in future research. At the same time, it can enjoyably inform a broad spectrum of non-historians on the importance of labor and labor usage in the development of the United States. Bezis-Selfa should be commended for his efforts, and his book is highly recommended.

Nicolas Honerkamp, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga:

John Bezís-Selfa has produced a well-organized, meticulously researched, and thought-provoking account of eighteenth-century ironmaking in eastern British North America.... Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution is a book to be reckoned with. John Bezís-Selfa has fashioned a valuable, eminently readable, and ultimately stimulating contribution to early American industrial and labor history.

Robert Gordon, Yale University:

Forging America is a valuable resource for information about a lesser-known aspect of slave labor in North America.

Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh, co-author of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic:

This carefully researched, well-written book about work and workers in the iron industry establishes John Bezís-Selfa as a leading scholar in the field of early American labor history.