410 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE but one can ask what he did with the remains that do exist. The book makes clear his enormous dedication to hunting for physical remains, but good industrial archaeology goes beyond discovery and explora tion. I wanted to hear more than descriptions of searches, and hoped Rolando might offer some analysis of his fieldwork and general con clusions about the remains. He might, for example, have broken down the sites by date or period and tried to say something about evidence of changes in each industry over time. Certainly, he could have done more than list the number of remains in each county. If this book is viewed primarily as an inventory of sites designed to rectify the omission and neglect of these industries in histories of the state, these criticisms are perhaps unfair. The inventory format requires descriptions of individual sites, and my expectations may not have been Rolando’s. Yet the best work in IA is now confronting the question that authors writing for Technology and Culture are expected to address—So what? Rolando does not ignore that question, for he attempts to place Vermont’s iron, charcoal, and lime industries into regional and local historical and economic contexts. Still, more might have been expected in this area. While interesting historical accounts are to be found here, most readers will find the descriptions of physi cal remains from Vermont’s iron, charcoal, and lime industries the strength of this book. Bruce Seely Dr. Seely, an associate professor of history at Michigan Technological University and SHOT’S secretary, recently edited Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography: The Iron and Steel Industry in the Twentieth Century (New York: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1994). He continues to work with Terry Reynolds on a history of engineering education in the United States. Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Fac tory System, 1815—1850. By David A. Zonderman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. ix + 357; notes, bibliography, index. $45.00. Scattered in archives throughout New England, diaries, letters, and reminiscences have long provided labor historians with an unusually rich cache of information about some of America’s earliest machine tenders. Indeed, the very literariness of the Lowell, Massachusetts, “factory girls” helps explain their attraction to historians eager to explore the attitudes and thoughts of ordinary workers. In Aspirations and Anxieties, David Zonderman continues this tradition, although he seems curiously unfamiliar with it, claiming that “no one has exam ined previously in a complete historical monograph” such operative writings and his goal is “to let these working people speak for them selves” (pp. 4—5). Using “classic tools of intellectual history” (p. 4)— the previously mentioned sources, as well as newspapers, strikers’ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 411 proclamations, and legislative petitions—Zonderman seeks to “re store a sense of agency and human individuality to the history of these operatives” (p. 7). If Zonderman seems unaware that worker agency, experience, and mentalité have been central themes in over two decades of labor his tory, he seems equally uninformed about recent questions of episte mology and methodology. For historians in general and of the “inar ticulate” in particular, stories are both necessary and problematic, for they are always mediated events that invest certain things—particular discourses, knowledge, events, and specific categories, concepts, and patterns—with power and authority while simultaneously disqualify ing, denying, or eclipsing others. The fact that many of the Lowell operatives’ stories were sought out in the 1880s and thus preserved raises questions about the “innocent eye” of history. Read carefully, such documents tell us a great deal about the “inarticulate,” both as “real” historical beings and as historically produced concepts. Yet for Zonderman, the fact that industrialization has come to be so closely linked with the factory girls of Lowell is a subject he ignores even as he contributes to the legend. In his effort to let workers speak for themselves, Zonderman’s story reads like many of the 19th-century writers he uncritically invokes. Relying extensively on personal testimony, especially Lucy Larcom’s A New England Girlhood and Harriet Robinson’s Loom and Spindle, he conceives of antebellum workers...