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 secure its national independence. By the eve of the Revolutionary War, furnaces and forges in the American colonies turned out one-seventh of the world's iron.Forging America illuminates the fate of labor in an era when industry, manhood, and independence began to take on new and highly charged meanings. John Bezís-Selfa argues that the iron industry, with its early concentrations of capital and labor, reveals the close links between industrial and political revolution. Through means ranging from religious exhortation to force, ironmasters encouraged or compelled workers—free, indentured, and enslaved—to adopt new work styles and standards of personal industry. Eighteenth-century revolutionary rhetoric hastened the demise of indentured servitude, however, and national independence reinforced the legal status of slavery and increasingly defined manual labor as "dependent" and racially coded. Bezís-Selfa highlights the importance of slave labor to early American industrial development. Research in documents from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries led Bezís-Selfa to accounts of the labor of African-Americans, indentured servants, new immigrants, and others. Their stories inform his highly readable narrative of more than two hundred years of American history.

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

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