Seminar
American Industrialization
- Date
- March 17, 2007
- Speaker
- Dr. Kenneth J. Heineman, Professor, Department of History, Ohio University
- Description
In 1890 the United States became the leading industrial and economic power in the world. Much of that achievement could be traced to the factories, entrepreneurs, and workers of the Midwest and, in particular, Ohio. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe flocked to the automobile plants of Michigan and Ohio and to the steel mills of Pennsylvania and the Buckeye State. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor and a naval attaché in Washington in the 1920s, warned Japanese militarists that, having seen the steel mills of Cleveland, a military victory over the U.S. was unlikely. But if American soldiers drove to victory in Jeeps manufactured in Toledo, their children were destined to live in the Rustbelt. By the early 1980s, after the last steel mills closed in Youngstown, the Mahoning River, which had long received red-hot industrial waste, froze over for the first time in a century. This seminar will examine the rise and fall of manufacturing with a particular emphasis on labor relations, economic change, and the failure of Ohio’s northern industrial frontier to adapt to the global economy.
- Location
- 2080 Citygate Dr. Columbus, OH 43219 [view map]
