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Full-Text Articles in Law
Daniel Amsterdam's Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen's Campaign For A Civic Welfare State, Laura Phillips Sawyer
Daniel Amsterdam's Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen's Campaign For A Civic Welfare State, Laura Phillips Sawyer
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Daniel Amsterdam’s Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State challenges the conventional narrative of early twentieth-century American businessmen as promoting laissezfaire or antistatist politics. Instead, as Amsterdam argues, elite business leaders campaigned vigorously for greater municipal spending on civic welfare projects, which included building and improving public schools, public health infrastructure, parks and playgrounds, libraries, and museums. Rather than focus on national-level business in- government, his narrative traverses multiple cities (Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta) to demonstrate both the diversity of political challenges and institutional constraints that civic-minded reformers faced as well as the striking convergence of civic welfare …
Andrew B. Arnold's Fueling The Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, And Disorder In Pennsylvania Coal Country, Laura Phillips Sawyer
Andrew B. Arnold's Fueling The Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, And Disorder In Pennsylvania Coal Country, Laura Phillips Sawyer
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Andrew Arnold’s Fueling the Gilded Age explores the struggles for managerial control and economic power that erupted among coal miners, coal operators, and railroad executives in central Pennsylvania between 1872 and 1902. Rather than presenting an unassailable triumph of the railroads’ interests over labor, Arnold argues that the “coal industry defied order” (p. 3) and laborers exhibited “unexpected agency ” (p. 4, emphasis in original) by thwarting the plans of railroad executives to impose managerial capitalism from the top down. Instead, wage earners “refused to accept their designated fate as commodities” (p. 222) and thereby exerted influence on the institutional …