Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution - An Account of the Coming of the Machines, the Making of a New Way of Life in the Mill Hamlets, the Triumph of Evangelical Capitalists Over Socialists and Infidels, and the Transformation of the Workers into Christian Soldiers in a Cotton-Manufacturing District in Pennsylvania in the Years Before and During the Civil War

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1980. 1st Printing. Trade Paperback. Very Good. 5x1x8. Howard, Robert. First printing. Spine faded. 1980 Trade Paperback. xx, 553 pp. A celebrated triumph of historiography, Rockdale tells the story of the Industrial Revolution as it was experienced by the men, women, and children of the cotton-manufacturing town of Rockdale, Pennsylvania. The lives of workers, managers, inventors, owners, and entrepreneurs are brilliantly illuminated by Anthony F. C. Wallace, who also describes the complex technology that governed all of Rockdale's townspeople. Wallace examines the new relationships between employer and employee as work and workers moved out of the fields into the closed-in world of the spinning mule, the power loom, and the mill office. He brings to light the impassioned battle for the soul of the mill worker, a struggle between the exponents of the Enlightenment and Utopian Socialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ultimately triumphant champions of evangelical Christianity.