| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John Bezís-Selfa. Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 279. $39.95.
Industrial development in colonial British America and the early United States is usually portrayed as either a process of risk taking, creative entrepreneurship, and the creative and efficient use of the factors of production, or as a process of proletarianization, the dissolution of the craft system, and the managing of resulting discontent by emergent political parties. Less typically is industrialization viewed as a series of challenges to ways of life and patterns of thought that most Americans considered fundamental to their identities and to their personal and collective well-being. In this book, John Bezís-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-nineteenth centuries, Bezís-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.	1
Much like grist and saw mills, iron works dotted the early American landscape and provided local and regional communities with a commodity that was necessary for collective well-being and survival. Like their mill counterparts, iron works were also among the most capital-intensive enterprises in an otherwise agrarian and craft-oriented society. Bezís-Selfa accounts for these economic and organizational aspects in fluid prose and convincing detail, but the essence of his study lies in a reconstruction of the meaning of iron-making and the personal and collective transformations it represented for generations of Americans.	. . .

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