Iron Mills Research Articles

Disturbing Aesthetics

Jill Gatlin, “Disturbing Aesthetics: Industrial Pollution, Moral Discourse, and Narrative Form in Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron Mills’” (pp. 201–233) This essay reevaluates the historical, literary, cultural, and ecological significance of Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861) in the context of industrial pollution. Situating the story in relation to contemporaneous debates regarding the benefits and hazards of coal smoke, I extend the work of historians who have overlooked the influence of moralizing rhetoric on early understandings of industrial waste and workers. As Davis contests idealized equations of smoke with economic equality, progress, and health, she also delineates the spatial stratification determining laborers’ debilitating exposure to smoke and censures the paternalistic proclivity to blame the poor for pollution and prescribe their moral improvement. I argue that Davis undermines moralizing pollution discourse by crafting an aesthetic of disturbance through her narrative form and construction of readers, which departs from sentimental, realist, gothic, and pastoral formal features that critics have associated with the story. Entering the frame story, readers must reconsider their spatial and social positionality as well as their affective response to pollution. Davis positions readers to move beyond self-stabilizing, dismissive disgust to interactive empathy that prompts them to confront their complicity in workers’ oppression and classification as waste. Intervening in nascent pollution discourse with more complexity than many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers and reformers would, “Life in the Iron Mills” disrupts popular, gothic, and pastoral accounts of moral, corporeal, and spatial purity regulating the aesthetic and material category of the human in toxic industrial environments.

MANUSIA DAN LINGKUNGAN DALAM NOVEL LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS KARYA REBECCA HARDINGS DAVIS

This study aims to investigate the possibilities of alleviating the damage of the environment as a result of industrialization driven by the capitalist system as seen in Life in the Iron Mills, a novella by Rebecca Harding Davis. This study applied ecocriticism which succinctly might be defined as study of the relation between literature and environment conducted in a commitment to environmental praxis. The findings show that there should be the actions of moral principles as a consideration in social policies, politics, and economy. The principles include respect, responsibility, love and care, simplicity, and justice. These actions allow changes from the material-oriented lifestyle to the simple lifestyle and are done by an individual or community to encourage the reform. Everybody should jointly and actively practice the environmental ethics.

Lucy Larcom and the Poetics of Child Labour

Lucy Larcom and the Poetics of Child Labour Joe Lockard (bio) Child labour has been present in North America since the beginnings of European colonization, and regulation of their industrial employment dates at least to the early nineteenth century in Rhode Island (Abbott). Given moral injunctions to keep children from mischief and utilitarian demands for labour and family income, such regulation remained basically ineffective. With industrial expansion following the American Civil War children established themselves as a major presence in the workforce and occasionally appeared in industrial stories such as Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861). By 1880 an estimated 6 percent of U.S. children between ages ten to fifteen were working in industry (Felt 1). Early child advocates such as Charles Loring Brace of the Children’s Aid Society in New York opposed child labour and documented its prevalence (1872, 353–65, and 1893). The height of political concern over child labour occurred between the 1890s and the 1920s, with the establishment of the National Child Labor Committee; the documentary photography of Louis Hine; initiatives from Congress and state legislatures; the creation of the Child Labor Office within the U.S. Bureau of Labor; and legal contests over child labour taxes. Representations of child labour proliferated with social reportage such [End Page 139] as Thomas Robinson Dawley’s The Child That Toileth Not (1912), which describes his travels in Southern mills and industries as an investigator appointed by the Bureau of Labor. For all of this emergent social concern, we have very little literary documentation of the consciousness of working children.1 In the antebellum United States the predominant reform concerns—slavery, temperance, and women’s rights—addressed the social concerns of children in relation to these issues. There are no known antebellum autobiographies of working-class children, and their stories tend to appear in brief unreflective passages of adult autobiographies that mention childhood labour. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, representation of children at work came almost entirely from adult authors describing their observations. Much of it emerged in the form of short stories or romance novels, such as Day Kellogg Lee’s Merrimack: or, Life at the Loom (1854), a fictional first-person narrative of an orphaned thirteen-year-old girl who goes to work in the mills and benefits by acquiring independence. Autobiographical self-representation focused on the labour experiences of U.S. working-class children only begins to emerge a rough half-century later, with such texts as Through the Mill: The Life of a Mill-Boy (1911) by Al Priddy, a child immigrant from England who describes his experiences as an eleven-year-old in the New Bedford mills. As another example, Rose Cohen’s Out of the Shadow (1918) is the autobiography of an immigrant Russian Jewish girl’s life in the piecework shops of the Lower East Side in the 1890s. Given the absence of more than limited narrative and epistolary evidence, one purpose of the present discussion lies in elucidating this tradition through examination of how child labour informed the ethos and conscience of a nineteenth-century American writer and how her work-place memories from a textile mill emerged in literary form to replace a foreshortened childhood. Lucy Larcom’s narratives of child labour during the mid-1840s, published several decades later, represented an inherent advocacy of human developmental rights during a period when U.S. law did not acknowledge children’s industrial labour as a social wrong. Her advocacy was fragmentary, mixed together with larger stories, and did not have an argumentative focus on child labour. Persistence delineates a consciousness, however, and Larcom’s persistent return to images and [End Page 140] themes of child labour characterizes her writing more than its repetition of standard sentimental tropes of nature. A consciousness of child labour contributed a subterranean radicalism that emerged with opportunity in the imagery of a poet otherwise careful to shape her market acceptability for middle-class Victorian America. The present paper first will address Larcom’s autobiographical self-observations in A New England Girlhood (1889) concerning her life as a child worker, in order afterward to contextualize representations of labour in...

ウメ、カキ剪定枝によるバイオ固体燃料の圧縮強度特性

In order to reduce the exhaustion of carbon dioxide, the utilization of unused woody biomass such as forestry biomass and pruned branch has come to attract attention as an alternative fuel of coal. Most of the coal are used at coal-fueled power plants and iron mills. In the present study, bio-solid fuels to alternate coal cokes are investigated. Pruned branches of ume and persimmon which are the typical fruit trees cultivated in Wakayama prefecture are used as biomass resources. To establish a technical basis for the method of manufacturing bio-solid fuel with high hardness, effects of molding temperature, tress species and diameter of pruned branch on compressive strength properties of bio-solid fuel are clarified. The results obtained are as follows. In the case of ume, the compressive strength has a maximum, when the molding temperature is 140-160 degree C. There is no effect of diameter of pruned branch on compressive strength. In the case of persimmon, the compressive strength has a maximum, when the molding temperature is 180 degree C. The compressive strength decreases with decreasing the diameter of pruned branch. The difference in compressive strength between ume and persimmon is considered to be caused by the particle shape.

Influence of emissions from iron and steel mills on the atmospheric ozone concentration. Part 1

Influence of emissions from iron and steel mills on the atmospheric ozone concentration. Part 1

Criticism in the Iron Mills: New Working-Class Studies and the Class Turn

Review Article| May 01 2008 Criticism in the Iron Mills: New Working-Class Studies and the Class Turn John Marsh John Marsh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2008) 2008 (70): 199–205. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-2008-70-199 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John Marsh; Criticism in the Iron Mills: New Working-Class Studies and the Class Turn. the minnesota review 1 May 2008; 2008 (70): 199–205. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-2008-70-199 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2008 the minnesota review2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Ecosublime: Environmental Awe and Terror from New World to Oddworld by Lee Rozelle

2 0 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 7 Wave science fiction and of cyberpunk and a new generation of writers who consciously integrate the ongoing dialectic about western frontiers into their complex projections of the future. As Abbott observes about his book’s design, it reconstructs earlier discus­ sions through the perspectives of contemporary literary and cultural studies and current historiography. “The organization of the book mirrors both the Turnerian sequence and the complicating arguments of recent historians” (32). Thus, his chapter titles provide a kind of historiography of future histories inter­ woven with aesthetic assessments of the stories they inspire. From an introduc­ tion titled “Launching Pads,” we proceed to examine “Never Final Frontiers,” and literal, new, physical frontiers in chapters such as “Beyond Alaska: Sourdoughs, Lunies, Belters, and Other Tough Guys” and “Johnny Appleseed, John Wayne, and Homesteading on the Extraterrestrial Frontier.” He examines thematic frontiers such as “Frontier Democracy” and “On the Urban Edge” and informational and virtual frontiers in “Information Everywhere: Pacific Destinies in the Twenty-First Century.” Artfully weaving connections between history and fiction, cultural theory and aesthetics, Frontiers Past and Future should provide food for thought to any­ one interested in genuinely interdisciplinary studies. Science fiction has often been misconceived to be simply speculative prediction in fictional form, but more fundamentally it functions as extrapolative cultural metaphor. This study demonstrates how apparently separate traditions mirror each other’s central themes and how stories of the past and future can enrich our understanding of the present. It has often been observed that we can’t know where we are without knowing how we got here. Perhaps it’s equally true, in this era of future shock, that scouting out where we’re going requires that we first envision new terrain that does not exist. E cosublime: Environm ental Awe and Terror from New World to Oddworld. By Lee Rozelle. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. 134 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Nicholas Lawrence Texas A&M University, College Station In Ecosublime, Lee Rozelle challenges the “detached posture” of Green criti­ cism as currently practiced in the academy, arguing that “we must unlock the constructionist’s cage” of language and culture and “remember a wider range of human links to the outside” (2). Interrogating representations of ecological space from a striking gamut of media, Rozelle’s book identifies a post-Burkean “ecosublime” whereby literary figures become shocked into apprehending their essential inextricability from the ecological spaces they inhabit. Such literary apprehension, Rozelle argues, can lead audiences to more sensible engagements with the natural environment. Throughout, Rozelle juxtaposes works that fully B o o k R e v ie w s realize ecological apprehension against those which, while falling well short of the ecosublime mark, nevertheless stand out in their potential for catalyzing audiences “to perceive their world anew” (7). Chapter 1, for example, examines two representatives of nineteenth-century frontier literature, contrasting the depletionism of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Journal ofJulius Rodman (1840) with the ecological integrations underpinning Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879). Though Poe’s use of nature-loving discourse thinly veils a mindset shaped by commodification, Rozelle identifies several moments where Rodman’s rhetoric of sublimity allows readers inroads into connecting with surrounding ecologies. In contrast to Poe’s protagonist, Bird’s narrator deconstructs the region’s isolate mining culture by threading her narrative with epiphanic moments allowing literary figures to experience interconnection to the broader ecological whole. Having established these textual categories, Rozelle then expands upon them. Joining the instructive ecological failures of Poe’s Journal are Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), Salem cigarette packages, and John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy: The Monster Movie (1979). At the same time, Rozelle identifies ecosublimity in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) and Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861), arguing these works shock read­ ers into associating ecological depletionism with their own dehumanization. Williams Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1963), Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir: The...

Landscape and ideology in American renaissance literature: topographies of skepticism

Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville and the Diffusion of Estrangement: 1. Critiquing colonial American geography: Hawthorne's landscape of bewilderment 2. Thoreau and the interminable journey of vision 'nearer and nearer here' 3. Herman Melville's home cosmography: voyaging into the inscrutable interior of the American republic Part II. Historicizing the American Vanishing Point: Indian Removal, Slavery and Class: 4. The cultural politics of American literary ambiguity 5. Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes and 'Chief Seattle's Speech': the obliquities of the geographic in-between 6. The power of negative space in Douglass's autobiographies and in Davis's 'Life in Iron Mills' Conclusion.

Genevieve Taggard's Sentimental Marxism in Calling Western Union

This article investigates Genevieve Taggard's Calling Western Union (1936), the only volume of Taggard's poetry devoted to class issues. It argues that this work is more complex than its obvious Marxism suggests because Taggard recasts an earlier sentimental ethic of interpersonal bonds and helping others in Marxist terms. Initially, I discuss Taggard's links with earlier sentimental writers and works, especially Rebecca Harding Davis' Life in the Iron Mills, in order to establish this ethic. I utilize this philosophical framework to inform close readings of Taggard's autobiographical Preface and representative vocalic poems in which women play key political roles. Taggard develops these poems, in which speakers emulate another voice, more fully than those used in worker's correspondence poems and in Tillie Olsen's "I Want You Women Up North to Know" by representing the entire socio-economic spectrum. Thus, Taggard juxtaposes affluent characters with middle class speakers who empathize with the working class. She also uses a knowledgeable, middle class voice to help readers define the working class and at appropriate moments supersedes this voice with those of the workers. Both middle and working class speakers demonstrate the efficacy of a sentimental ethic by performing functions appropriate to their class.

Quantitative Determination of Metallic Iron Content in Steel-Making Slag

A quantitative analytical method for metallic iron was developed for wastes from iron and steel mills. These wastes consist of slags, dusts and sludges, mill scales, spent pickle liquor, and other iron-bearing materials. Accurate determination of metallic iron in these wastes will provide the vital information for the recycling or reuse of these wastes. The new procedure for the determination of metallic iron (Fe0) was developed and various factors that could affect the test result were determined. Pure metallic iron powders were mixed with pure iron oxides with various ratios and then were tested using this method. Testing results had excellent agreement with actual concentration. Samples from several sites have been tested.

Suicide, Social Reform, and the Elision of Working-Class Resistance in Rebecca Harding Davis'sLife in the Iron Mills

Since 1972, the year that Tillie Olsen and the Feminist Press resurrected it, Rebecca Harding Davis'sLife in the Iron Mills, which presents the tragic circumstances of the life of a Welsh furnace tender, has primarily been discussed in terms of it being an unjustly forgotten forerunner of such realist fiction of the later decades of the 19th century as Frank Norris'sMcTeague(1899) and Theodore Dreiser'sSister Carrie(1900). With its portrait of the “tragic realities of the immigrant poor, the cynicism of factory owners, [and] the brutality of working class life,” it has been widely praised for being “the earliest notable experiment of American realism,” for exemplifying a literary theory of the commonplace two decades prior to William Dean Howells's better-known theory of the same, and for dramatizing the “socioeconomic implications of environmental determinism” several years prior to Émile Zola's naturalism.

Rebecca Harding Davis: writing cultural autobiography

Nineteenth-century fiction writer and journalist Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) is best known for her novella Life in the Iron Mills. Its publication in 1861 launched her stunning fifty-year career that yielded a corpus of some 500 published works, including short stories, novels, novellas, sketches, and social commentary. Davis's unique mode of writing anticipated literary realism twenty years before the time usually associated with its genesis. Today, her life and work continue to figure prominently in the study of American literature and culture. Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography is the annotated edition of her 1904 autobiography, Bits of Gossip, and a previously unpublished family history written for her children. The memoirs are not traditional autobiography; rather, they are Davis's perspective on the extraordinary cultural changes that occurred during her lifetime and of the remarkable - and sometimes scandalous - people who shaped the events. She provides intimate portraits of the famous people she knew, including Emerson, Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Ann Stephens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Horace Greeley. Equally important are Davis's commentaries on the political activists of the Civil War era, from Abraham Lincoln to Booker T. Washington, from the daughters of the Southland to Lucretia Mott, from Henry Ward Beecher to William Still. Whereas Bits of Gossip expands our understanding of Davis as cultural critic and observer of life, the family history offers new information on Davis's early life and the influences that led her to become one of the nineteenth century's pioneering Realists and cultural commentators. Together they bring a human voice to the nineteenth-century American milieu.

Feminism and Alienated Labor: Rebecca Harding Davis'sLife in the Iron Mills

As One of the primary works of American literature to be recovered by feminist archaeology,Life in the Iron Mills(1861) can also stand as the test of a theoretical blind spot of early feminist criticism – its inability to see “bad writing” – for Davis's novella is notably awkward in its conception and construction. An obvious reason for the lack is that this kind of judgment fulfills an assumption of patriarchy in regard to women's writing: “that the reason for the absence of women [in the literary canon] is that women have not written in the past – or that what they have written is not very good” (Spender, 1). In the older formalist critical dispensation, aesthetic defects had to be publicly identified and labeled, like Hester Prynne's badge of shame. I certainly do not mean to suggest that feminism (however constituted) has any obligation to reproduce this order of judgment, but not owning such effects has consequences. Davis's novella can temporarily resolve this dilemma by using feminism to expose the traditional aesthetics of judgment.

“Discovering Some New Race”: Rebecca Harding Davis's “Life in the Iron Mills” and the Literary Emergence of Working-Class Whiteness

Recent readings of Rebecca Harding Davis's landmark exploration of the emerging industrial working class have been concerned primarily with the connections between class formation and gender relations. By focusing attention instead on the text's indebtedness to various contemporaneous discourses of racial subjection (which crucially shape and delimit analyses of class and representations of labor during the late antebellum era), I argue that the transcendence, mobility, and salvation that the text allows its working-class characters are subtly but consistently aligned with an emerging racial conception of whiteness. Not only does this alignment link freedom with whiteness and exploitation with blackness, but through these disabling linkages it also establishes a literary precedent for representing (and Actively resolving) class struggles with racial language.

"That Joyous Certainty": History and Utopia in Tillie Olsen's Depression-Era Literature

Utopian consciousness wants to look far into the distance, but ultimately only in order to penetrate the darkness so near it of the just lived moment, in which everything is both drives and is hidden from itself. - Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (12) Strong with the not yet in the now . . . - Tillie Olsen, Me a (109) Tillie Olsen is one of the few American proletarian writers of the Great Depression who continues to engage the literary and political imaginations of readers and scholars. She is best known for her collection of award-winning short stories Tell Me a Riddle (1961) and to a lesser extent for the unfinished novel Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974), as well as for a collection of literary essays entitled Silences (1978). She is presently known as a left feminist writer, although more feminist than left, due in large part to the recuperation of her work by feminist scholars since the women's movement.(1) Undoubtedly, Olsen's writings deserve the recognition they have received; her depictions of modern American working-class life are some of the most powerful in American literary history. When reading her writings, one is led to ask from what political, creative, or historical source they emanate. For those familiar with Olsen scholarship, the answers are familiar: her socialist upbringing, her working-class life, motherhood, the Depression, the Communist Party (of which she was a member in the 1930s), Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, and feminism, for example. However, what all of these important explanations have not adequately addressed, and what this essay proposes to address through an analysis of Olsen's Depression-era literary works, is how the 1930s labor mass movements impacted proletarian literary production. The mass movements of the 30s are unparalleled in American history, both in their practical consequences (from the enactment of legislation defending the right to strike to the creation of a welfare state) and, more important to this study, in their transformations of the American workers' psyche. During the Great Depression, countless workers realized their personal struggle to make a living was part of a class struggle endemic to capitalism, a realization manifested in the strike waves of 1933-34 and 1936-37, the hunger marches, the Bonus March, as well as in the rent strikes, riots, and other expressions of collective working-class rebellion of the period. In other words, masses of American workers had developed a sense of class consciousness and, more importantly, class agency, for they saw themselves as important agents of history and not merely spectators of some tragicomedy of men on the stage of world history. Olsen's literary work expresses in many ways this radicalization of the American working class and what she later referred to (in another context) as that joyous certainty, sense of mattering, of moving and being moved, of being one and indivisible with the great of the past, with all freed, ennobled (Tell Me a 113). That is to say, Olsen's writings register the breach of reified consciousness in the American working class, as well as the revival of dialectical philosophy among American radical writers, generated by the economic crisis of the 1930s.(2) Unlike some of her literary peers, she was able creatively to transform her daily experiences of the mass movements and political education in the Young Communist League (YCL) of the American Communist Party (the latter itself owes much to the spontaneous movement of masses in the 1930s) into moving depictions of working-class life. She best expresses the scope of her dialectical vision of American society in Yonnondio, her novel about an American working-class family of the 1920s, as well as her piece of reportage on the 1934 waterfront strike entitled Strike. In both pieces, she depicts the social character and determinations of working-class life, while decoding its latent utopianism - a utopianism revealed by visible expressions of a collective desire for a better life, but thwarted by both objective and subjective conditions. …

Between Bodies of Knowledge there is a Great Gulf Fixed: A Liberationist Reading of Class and Gender in Life in the Iron Mills

Between Bodies of Knowledge there is a Great Gulf Fixed: A Liberationist Reading of Class and Gender in Life in the Iron Mills

Framing a "Life in the Iron Mills"

Framing a "Life in the Iron Mills" Richard A. Hood Richard A. Hood Denison University Notes 1. John Conron describes the story this way, seeing its tiers as reflective of its landscape, in "Assailant Landscapes and the Man of Feeling," JACult, 3 (1980), 487-500. Sharon Harris extends this three-level description to reflect a division in class distinction, in "Rebecca Harding Davis: From Romanticism to Realism," ALR, 21 (1989), 4. 2. Harris, p. 6. 3. Rebecca Harding Davis, "Life in the Iron Mills," in "Life in the Iron Mills" and Other Stories, ed. Tillie Olsen (New York: The Feminist Press, 1972), p. 11. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 4. Coppelia Kahn, "Lost and Found," Ms., 2 (April 1974), 34. 5. Emily Dickinson, "Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?" (#365), in Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960). 6. Note the implication that the reader will recognize "self-restraint" as a cardinal virtue. This is one of the relatively newly encoded virtues of the factory system. It would be interesting to explore the religious themes of the story and their connection to recently inscribed "virtues" of the nineteenth century. Mark Seltzer explores the connection between a growing culturalist "aestheticization of the natural body" (p. 459) and Davis's "uncanny hesitations about bodies and identities" (p. 466) in "The Still Life," ALH, 3 (Fall 1991), 455-86: "Davis's account . . . registers . . . the discipline of organized bodily movement that spread throughout the social body from the late eighteenth century on, disciplines centered in but not restricted to the army and the prison, the school and the factory" (p. 465). For an historical account of a new, religiously sanctioned conception of virtue as "self-discipline" growing up with the factory system, see Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). The new virtues "served the needs not of 'society' but of entrepreneurs who employed wage labor" (p. 137). 7. William Shurr, "Life in the Iron-Mills: A Nineteenth-Century Conversion Narrative," ATQ, 5 (1991), 245-57. 8. Shurr, pp. 256, 251. 9. Seltzer, p. 467. 10. Seltzer, p. 468. 11. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, in Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, ed. G. Thomas Tanselle (New York: Library of America, 1985), p. 1408. 12. Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1978), p. 51. 13. Charlotte Goodman, "Portraits of the Artiste Manqué by Three Women Novelists," Frontiers, 5, no. 3 (Fall 1980), 57-59. 14. Jean Pfaelzer, "Rebecca Harding Davis: Domesticity, Social Order, and the Industrial Novel," International Journal of Women's Studies, 4 (May-June 1981), 237. 15. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in Three Novels, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 68. 16. Seltzer, p. 466. Copyright © 1995 Northeastern University

Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism

From the late 1860s until her death in 1910, Rebecca Harding Davis was one of the best-known writers in America. She broke into print as a young woman in the 1860s with Life in the Iron Mills, which established her as one of the pioneers of American realism. She developed a literary theory of the commonplace nearly two decades before William Dean Howels shaped his own version of the concept. Yet, in spite of her importance to the literary and popular culture of her time, she has been, for the most part, ignored by scholars. Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism helps to change that.

Liver cirrhosis deaths within occupations and industries in the California occupational mortality study

Mortality rates were drawn from the California Occupational Mortality Study (COMS) to analyze liver cirrhosis deaths within occupations and industries from 1979 to 1981. Age-adjusted Standardized Mortality Rates (SMRs) were made available by the State of California for separate analyses of women, men, blacks and whites. Rankings of occupations with narrow confidence intervals were strikingly similar for blacks and whites. Within occupations, the highest female SMRs were for waitresses, telephone operators, cosmetologists, dress makers, hospital orderlies, textile workers, and laborers. The lowest female SMRs were for skilled crafts workers and teachers. High male occupations included water transportation workers, bartenders, loggers, laborers, roofers, construction workers, farm workers, iron workers, and painters. Low male occupations included teachers, physicians and dentists, managers, factory supervisors, business sales workers, heavy equipment operators, and other professionals. High female industries included eating and drinking places, laundry/dry cleaning, nursing and personal care facilities, aerospace, beauty shops, and entertainment. Low female industries included wholesale trades and education. High male industries included water transportation, military, guard services, eating and drinking places, iron and steel mills, and railroads. Low male industries included research/engineering labs, education, and computer manufacturing. This study was descriptive. It remains unknown whether certain jobs cause excessive drinking and cirrhosis, or whether people who are prone to develop cirrhosis select certain jobs.

Living in the Iron Mills: A Tempering of Nineteenth‐Century America's Orphic Poet

Living in the Iron Mills: A Tempering of Nineteenth‐Century America's Orphic Poet