Mastering Iron

“Anne Kelly Knowles has built a reputation over the past decade for highly innovative applications of GIS in historical scholarship. . . . This new book is distinguished by the depth of its historical scholarship, and the way in which GIS is fully integrated into the research process. . . . Beautifully presented and compellingly written.”

“Knowles’s enthralling, well-researched history will entertain and inform a range of audiences from general readers and undergraduates to graduate students, researchers, and faculty. Highly recommended.”

“Anne Kelly Knowles brings a new approach to our understanding of American ironmaking by coupling geography with the history of technology. Through the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, Americans transformed their underdeveloped ironworks into a major industry in the world economy. They borrowed the technology and organization techniques of the highly successful works in South Wales, only to discover that differences in natural resources, geography, weather, climate, and community structure thwarted direct technology transfer across the Atlantic. Knowles draws on her experience in Wales and her skills as a geographer to show us the barriers that had to be overcome by the American entrepreneurs and their immigrant workers. She introduces us to the people involved, and with an array of beautiful maps, shows us who went where and what had to be moved about by canals and railroads to achieve the success in ironmaking that would be the foundation of the subsequent American world-class steel industry.”

“Scholars have extensively documented the United States’ rise to world leadership in the iron and steel industry in the late nineteenth century, but their neglect of the antebellum iron industry left a puzzle. By standards of the superior British, French, and German industries, America’s iron industry was woefully uncompetitive. Anne Kelly Knowles brilliantly resolves the puzzle through her use of theory and rich archival evidence covering the period between 1800 and 1868. From this she fashions a richly textured story of the challenges of the antebellum actors to develop the practices and technologies of the iron industry, their search for mineral resources, and their struggles to market iron. Knowles unequivocally demonstrates that by the end of the Civil War the iron industry was poised to exploit the possibilities of the territorial expansion of the dynamic national economy.”

“Anne Kelly Knowles has molded a thoroughly original geographic analysis of the emergent iron industry in nineteenth-century America. She rolls out a sweeping national portrait through a series of stunning maps and thoroughly satisfying prose before hammering out the diverging regional patterns through an examination of individual company records. Her insights both challenge and build upon prior historical interpretations. This is exactly what great historical geography should be.”

“Anne Kelly Knowles’s Mastering Iron will immediately take its place as one of the landmark works in the industrial history of the United States. Its merits are many: the research in both primary and secondary sources is thorough and thoughtful; the writing is consistently clear, vigorous, and engaging; and she asks the right questions about her subject and provides compelling answers. The result is the most analytically sophisticated geographic portrait we have ever had of this critically important, amazingly diverse, and grossly understudied American industry.”