Youngstown

Rebecca Harding Davis wrote “Life in the Iron Mills” in the mid-nineteenth century in part to raise awareness about working conditions in industrial mills. With the goal of presenting the reality of the mills’ environment and the lives of the mill workers, Davis employs vivid and concrete descriptions of the mills, the workers’ homes, and the workers themselves. Yet her story’s realism is not objective; Davis has a reformer’s agenda, and her word-pictures are colored accordingly. One theme that receives a particularly negative shading in the story is big business and the money associated with it. Davis uses this negative portrayal of money to emphasize the damage that the single-minded pursuit of wealth works upon the humanity of those

Urban crime is represented, as a key element in the movie, “Mystic River”. It is also very typical for American cities to have higher crime rates than that of rural or suburban areas. Different areas have different cultures and ways of living that directly affect how people mature; in cities distinct cultures exist and segregation based on where people live (or their religion/ethnicity) is quite common. Many people end up living where they grew up which allows corruption to be passed down through the generations. There are a lot of politics and secrets that

“Chicago and the nation entered the Progressive era. …The 1901 steel strike ended in defeat for the union, and the once powerful Amalgamated slipped into irrelevancy. Chicago’s steel mills remained unorganized, yet U.S steel tried to sidestep Chicago radicalism by developing a whole new town just across the border in Indiana. Gary, Indiana became the center of the region’s steel industry. Not overtly planned in the tradition of Pullman but nonetheless a company town…”

I greatly enjoyed reading this book and did so relatively quickly. This not only was a interesting subject manor but the author used a lot of statistics which I appreciated and it was told in a way that made you wanted to read on. I liked how he compared many of the regions

In the 1800s, the first Steel Mills were built in Youngstown, Ohio and it’s economy flourished their Steel Mills produced the majority of steel used in World War I, their economy picked up once again during World War II. This created many jobs. On September 19, 1977, “Black Friday,” was started. It was the beginning of the end for Youngstown, Ohio’s stable economy. On September 19, 1977 Youngstown starting losing the steel industry jobs, this lasted until the mid 1980s. Youngstown, Ohio became apart of the ,”Rust Belt,” along with Pittsburg. The,” Rust Belt is a chain of cities in northeastern and Midwestern US, that are known for their declining industries. According to Professor Harris, Youngstown, “Ohio will NEVER Recover. Youngstown, Ohio

The Metropolitan area of Youngstown- Warren- Boardman has been a declining area over the last few decades, and hope is not near. The situation of this city is unbelievable, with poverty just seeping at the seams. The city is struggling with low education, job scarcity, and crime. People are fleeing in hopes of finding work, leaving the population to decrease. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Youngstown Ohio is the only city to lose more than two percent of its population in two years. People are scared, depressed, and finding dangerous ways to cope with the reality of the city they are living in. The Metropolitan area of Youngstown-Warren-Boardman is on a fast decline due to the impoverished living conditions these people face daily.

After researching ten monuments in my hometown of Shamokin, a small anthracite coal region town in central Pennsylvania, I recognized a lack of representation of Shamokin’s coal mining heritage throughout its urban spaces. Considering coal was the main production of labor for decades, there are no public monuments dedicated to its most influential contribution to the world. This summer I undertook researching ten monuments that depict representations of coal miners and their heritage throughout different PA anthracite regions; thus, discovering how this important heritage is represented and its effect on the public memory of a town. As I archived materials on the monuments, I created a digital database curating the ten monuments and analyzing

The Ludlow Massacre of 1914 is one of the bloodiest strike in the American labor history. Historians have debated whether the event was a massacre of innocent lives caused by the Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I) or as a battle between the company workers and the company militiamen. The CF&I stated that the event was an act of its workers to demilitarize the company and to prevent importation of “strikebreakers”. However, Thomas Andrews’ Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War introduces the concept of workscape in which gives an understanding of the event internally, above the surface and underground the mines of Colorado. Within the book, the operation of Colorado coal companies in capitalizing the coal industry lead to the formation of the mine workscape in which united coal miners underground the mines and above the surface to fight for industrial and political rights. This paper would define the concept of workscape in the definition given by Andrews, and provide evidence of the responsibility of the exploitation of capitalism in forming the mine workscape in the Colorado coal fields between the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Furthermore, the closer inspection of several events that occurred within and outside the grounds of the Colorado coal fields related to labor unrest with the knowledge of the concept of workscape will help understand the culmination of the Ludlow massacre within the larger history of capitalism. A careful investigation of the book and other

In Life in the Iron Mills, Rebecca Harding Davis presents a story that explores the grim world of the lower class in the United States of the mid nineteenth century. Its purpose is to bring the obscured struggles of the lower class to a greater audience, soliciting sympathy for their cause, and to insinuating that these workers had the potential to do better for themselves, with the narrator claiming, “These men, going by with drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it” (Harding Davis 14). To this end, the narrator describes the life of Hugh Wolfe, a worker whose story ends in his own tragic suicide, after having failed in a scheme to use money stolen by Deborah to advance his station in life. Essentially, this story is a cry for social and economic reform, in the hopes of improving the dark situation that the lower class was facing in this time period.

I am from Lima, Ohio, which has its roots as both a railroad and oil town. The city was founded in 1831, when its first citizen, Absalom Brown, made his home in the area. Thanks to the five railroads that run through the city, it began to boom as a major railroad port, and when oil was found under the city in 1885, the population grew massively. However, around halfway through the 20th century, the city suffered the classic “boom or bust” economic downturn like other towns similar to it. Today, Lima is still an oil town with a large refinery on the south side, and a railroad port on the north side, but still struggles to break from its past.

Even after reading Mark Binelli 's book Detroit City is the Place to Be, it is difficult to believe that the city he is writing about exists here in the United States. This is after all, an economically prosperous, first world country. What Binelli so vividly describes is a place that could very well exist in some third world country. A third world slum-like city that boasts of not only one, but two professional sports teams. It is intriguing to ponder the whys and how’s of Detroit 's condition and failure to thrive. Despite the best intentions by those tasked with reviving and restoring this city to an at least functional state (the best that could seemingly be hoped for), Detroit seems to continuously decline. Binelli takes the reader through the sequences of events and causes that moved Detroit from a nineteenth century economically prosperous city, to a present day ghost of what once was.

Reminiscent of the 1980s based considerations historically demonstrating criminological sophistication, Earl Richard Quinney is most noted for his look at crime among the wealthy or elite classes, most predominantly as white-collar crime. Quinney was born in small town rural Wisconsin in 1934 to first generation Irish immigrants. Quinney spent his youth completely in rural Wisconsin, graduating from Delevan High School. He life to this point, revolved around small farm-town living, where populist political culture dominated the landscape. During this time he developed significant skill as a writer for his high school newspaper, and this led him to later attend Carroll College, a small liberal arts institution in Waukesha, Wisconsin where he was elected as student body president (Mutchnick et al., 1990). Quinney aspired to join the Forest Service, as well as medicine, where he considered synthesizing biological science with sociology with a career in medical administration. After a brief, unpleasurable, working stint upon graduation from Carroll College, Quinney attended graduate school at Northwestern University in Illinois where he wrote his master’s thesis on “Urbanization and the Scale of Society under the guidance of criminology scholars Kimball Young and William Byron. Not long after, Quinney went on to receive his post-graduate degree from his home state institution the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1962. The road to achieving his post-graduate degree

Post-Industrialization: an attack on the individual “Roger & Me” (1989) by the famous activist documentary film maker Michael Moore explores the themes of post–industrialism in his home town of Flint, Michigan while trying to track down Roger Smith the GM of General Motors who began shutting down Flint auto plants in 1985, eliminating over 30,000 jobs. Within the post-industrial theme, the film explores several key ideas that tie neatly into the concept of “the attack on the individual.” The key ideas are found in Flint’s crime escalation post factory shutdowns, the trend of the wealthy distancing themselves from the masses, and finally the relocation of factories and mechanization of labor. The film “Roger & Me” encapsulates how profit driven

The early history of the neighborhood saw it as a beacon of industry with its proximity to rivers and railways. At the end of the nineteenth century, it would boast a steelworks factory that employed a sizable portion of the Southside residents. Many of these residents were immigrants from Eastern Europe and brought many of their traditions with them to Pittsburgh. This way of life would continue until the 1980s when the steel plant was shut down. The area was absent

Ryan (2008) a faculty member of Harvard University reports that “The City of Detroit, Michigan was a natural subject for the study. Like many other cities in the American Midwest and West, Detroit grew rapidly, expanding from a population of essentially in 1850 to over 1,800,000 by 1950”. (p 2) The breakdown of the Big Three automakers has quickened Detroit 's decay, and occupants have been consistently escaping since the 1950s. In that time, the populace has dwindled from around 2 million to somewhat more than 700,000 individuals; aside from that, there are more than 70,000 deserted structures and numerous empty lots. Individuals have been relentlessly streaming out of the city for quite a long time, leaving behind empty homes and scantily populated neighborhoods, leaving vacant neighborhoods an invitation to more crime and other wrongdoing.