| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. Ed. by Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. xviii, 372 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8014-3921-3. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8014-8871-0.)
This exceptionally useful case study collection manages the neat trick of celebrating a historical approach it shows to be in need of profound reimagination. The effort is propelled by a powerful foreword from one of the originators of the approach—Barry Bluestone, who with Bennett Harrison wrote the immensely important The Deindustrialization of America, the 1982 book that led to what quickly became a solidified discourse on deindustrialization. Bluestone argues persuasively that, whatever its usefulness for the 1970s and early 1980s, the focus on job loss and on the conflict between capital and community cannot begin to describe more complex changes in work, industry, and community in the decades since—decades that have seen a significant revival and a profound restructuring of manufacturing in the U.S. economy.	1
It is not just that the world has changed since 1982. Bluestone and Harrison offered a clear presentation of the logic of capital at work in concrete decisions and policies. But success seems to have led deindustrialization to be taken as a kind of essentialized, naturalized, historicized transformation—a tectonic shift from industrial strength to a postindustrial economy with collateral community damage—within which the specific agency of capital, labor, and community is obscured. Deindustrialization Happens. People Are Hurt. They (sometimes) Resist. They (sometimes) Get Over It. Or Not. The World Moves On.	. . .

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