Singer Sewing Machine Research Articles

Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850–1940

Gendered Capitalism is a unique combination of interdisciplinary research—including business history, economic cultural history, management studies, international business, women's history, gender studies, and the history of technology—from a comparative and global perspective. Paula de la Cruz-Fernández offers a study of international business as much as of the home insofar as it explains gendered marketing structures and gender-specific advertising strategies by using the case of the sewing machine (p. 3). This book differs from traditional works on multinational firms that look at the evolution of a parent company and assume that its branches abroad mirrored it. Instead, the book shows how a global firm adopted local business practices in order to succeed in different countries and markets. Moreover, Cruz-Fernández examines cultural definitions of domesticity and associations between sewing and embroidery, in addition to how women's labor and role in society shaped international management. In doing so, this book presents a comprehensive history of women in business.Gendered Capitalism covers a 90-year period that is relevant both to the history of international business in general and to the history of the sewing machine in particular. During this time, the transportation revolution and technological innovations transformed productive processes and communications, leading to the emergence of multinational corporations and globalization. The Singer sewing machine is a good example of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The patented invention was successfully turned into a new tool and technology that was globally adopted as a household appliance. The Singer sewing machine became a global brand that revolutionized clothes making and embroidery while facilitating women's integration in the market. Indeed, Singer became a cultural institution.Although the sewing machine and its relevance to business and women's history are not new historical findings, Gendered Capitalism looks at two country cases, Spain and Mexico, in a novel manner. These cases are interesting for two main reasons: they were part of the developing world that was behind the more economically advanced economies, and they were the first Spanish-speaking countries where Singer established shops and depots (and remained for over a century). This book illuminates brilliantly how the firm had to adapt to each country's business culture in order to gain market share and maintain it for almost the entire time that sewing machines were an asset that allowed women to earn a livelihood. This required local expertise and the adoption of commercial and financial practices that enabled consumers to acquire their sewing machine. Likewise, it required the US headquarters to be flexible about different forms of practical business operations. The company's strategy proved successful: Singer continued to operate in each country despite political and economic turbulence arising from the Spanish-American War (1898), the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), and the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).Cruz-Fernández definitively explains how in both Spain and Mexico the sewing machine was viewed positively across the political and social spectrum. Singer sewing schools along with flexible forms of credit for acquiring their machines were crucial to this goal. For more progressive groups and female heads of households, credit plans and property rights as defined in each country allowed women to become sole owners of their sewing machines, which gave them a way to earn a living, start a business, or both while staying at home. Similarly, the sewing and embroidery advertised by Singer allowed for the promotion of the conservative values and duties of domesticity. Women, in any event, were involved in Singer as consumers and marketing experts throughout the period covered in the book.Gendered Capitalism thus successfully “puts forward a gender framework to examine the history of the multinational enterprise that places sewing and embroidery practices, which were pillars in the construction of ideas of domesticity, at the center of understanding how international business operations developed for Singer” (p. 179). Written in clear prose, the book has a solid grounding in primary sources. The author demonstrates a mastery of the methodologies and historiographies of international business history and gender history to develop interpretations that will contribute to each of these historiographies. Furthermore, Cruz-Fernández insightfully presents Singer's operations in Spain and Mexico in their respective national contexts and in global context. This book is essential reading for historians of women and gender interested in business history and the history of capitalism as well as for business and economic historians interested in learning more about gender history in Latin America and the world.

The Sewing Machine and Spectral Presences: Connolly, Shaw, and O’Casey

The Sewing Machine and Spectral Presences: Connolly, Shaw, and O’Casey

City Profile: Glasgow: City of Storytellers

city profile Glasgow City of Storytellers by J. R. Patterson GLASGOW IS NOT SO MUCH A CITY of books as a city of stories and storytellers . In the years I lived there, the stories I heard reflected the truly woeful conditions in which so many Glaswegians grew up; of filthy tenement blocks and binmen strikes, of bone-chilling winters and rat-catching, of the local variations on the kiss (a headbutt ) and the smile (a knife slash to the cheek). In other places, these tales might form the basis for lessons about character or values, but in Glasgow, they were more often the premise for jokes. Glasgow is, despite everything—the low pay, the dreich (bad weather), the weekend fankles—a jovial place, one quick to laugh. What is so confusing is that so many of Glasgow’s better times, usually considered to be when the Clyde shipyards and Singer sewing machine factory were in full swing, coincide with some of the city’s worst: its barest poverty, its foulest slums. Both the shipyards and the slums are gone now, leaving “The Dear Green Place” in a kind of stasis, being neither fully modern (hovering around fifty-five years, the life expectancy in the city’s east end is decades behind the rest of Europe) nor, with its plethora of vegan restaurants and modern sculpture, stuck in the dark ages. Of course, hard times persist. It’s for their evocation that Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain was lauded and rewarded the 2020 Man Booker. There again times have changed. In 1994, when Glaswegian James Kelman collected the same honor for How Late It Was, How Late, his Scots-language novel about substance abuse and generational trauma was ridiculed and scorned by readers and publishers alike for being a literary sandbank. Such thinking is completely glaikit, or stupid, as Kelman might write it. Much of it comes down to the language. Glaswegian , and the wider Scots language, is a form of English all its own, its meaning only possible to grasp in its echo, and sometimes not even then. It’s a sound even the Scots themselves, from the northern countryside to the English border, struggle to understand. Of his fellow Glaswegians , Kelman noted in his essay “The Importance of Glasgow in My Work” that “none of them knew how to talk! What larks! Every time they opened their mouth out came a stream of gobbledygook. Beautiful ! Their language a cross between semaphore and Morse code.” Writers who chose to work in that local patois are often considered by English scholars to be nothing but literary oiks. But within the use of that rough vernacular is the understanding that language not only transcends form and tradition, it also shapes them. Everywhere the Glaswegian is, the city is with him. Think of Billy Connolly’s two Glaswegians in Rome (hearing the Pope drinks crème de menthe before bed, they order two pints each. “The Pope drinks that stuff?” one says. “It’s nae wonder they carry him aboot on a chair!”). In the city, there are bookish sites—the baroque Mitchell Library, the Women’s Library, Alasdair Gray’s mural of roman-nosed nymphettes at the Hillhead subway station. Among the artists themselves, there is little literary tourism. If Glaswegians write well about hardship and want, it’s because it’s true to them. And any disregard among the growing self-refinement of British writing only proves its worth. Of course, there are books to buy. The best are found within the bourachs of Caledonia Books, Thistle Books, and the Voltaire & Rousseau Bookshop, which are all on the scrubby banks of the River Kelvin. Editorial note: To read Patterson’s essay on reviving Scottish Gaelic, turn to page 10. J. R. Patterson was born on a cattle and grain farm in rural Manitoba, Canada. He has worked as a farm laborer, factory worker, and writer. His fiction was longlisted for the 2016 CBC Short Story Contest. His essays can be found in Maisonneuve and Overland. Notebook 9 WORLDLIT.ORG 5 PHOTO BY ARTUR KRAFT / UNSPLASH ...

Conflitos: Fotografia e violência política no Brasil, 1889–1964

Former Brazilian president Washington Luís's famous dictum, “The social question is a matter for the police,” expressed the sentiment of elite politicians during the last years of Brazil's First Republic (1889–1930), when few citizens were eligible to vote and coffee barons and other oligarchs ruled the country with an iron fist. The dire conditions of former slaves, rural peasants, and the urban poor—both freed people of color and recent European immigrants—generated popular dissent of all kinds, which was quickly met with the police's baton and the soldier's bullet. The state's brutal response to all forms of protest largely reflected the defense of a rigidly hierarchical and unequal society and a political system that offered few channels for effective legal petitions to power holders by those seeking social justice.This volume captures the nature of that political violence through an examination of social conflicts from the beginning of the republic in 1889 to the 1964 military coup d'état, drawing on a rich array of beautifully reproduced images from the Moreira Salles Institute, the largest and most diverse private photography collection in Brazil. Carefully curated and thoughtfully framed through essays opening the book's three sections by leading scholars—Angela Alonso, Angela de Castro Gomes, and Heloisa Murgel Starling—the book documents regional revolts, naval mutinies, pacification campaigns, and diverse insurrections.Some of these social conflicts have produced iconic images of the Brazilian state's callousness. One becomes freshly unsettled in observing the empty stares of the 400 African-descended women huddled together, many with their heads shrouded with rough peasant cloth, who had just survived the Canudos massacre of the 1896–97 federal government campaigns against religious leader Antônio Conselheiro and his followers (pp. 80–81). The worn faces and the dark skin of resting soldiers in the municipal park of Itapira during the São Paulo revolt of 1932 against the central government, who seem exhausted from marching or perhaps a recent skirmish, reveal their humble social origins (pp. 248–49). Throughout this work one notes how the state time and again forcibly mobilized the poor to fight the poor.In Brazil, as elsewhere, photography in the early twentieth century became an instrument of the victors, documenting the demise of the vanquished and circulating those images in newspapers and other print vehicles, and later in newsreels, to show the power of the state and the consequences of rebellion. The image of the severed heads of rural bandit Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, popularly known as Lampião, and ten of his men, displayed artfully on four steps at the entrance to a rural home with leather half-moon-shaped cangaceiro hats, ammunition belts, and two Singer sewing machines meticulously placed nearby, sends a clear message to the viewer (p. 295). Yet rebels also employed the same medium to promote their strength, power, and persistence, as in the posed photo published in a popular newspaper of Lampião's partner, Maria Bonita, elegantly seated somewhere in the barren sertão affectionately petting a dog, or in the group picture of leaders of the Prestes Column, from the late 1920s, sitting comfortably with their legs crossed wearing high leather boots and conveying a calm determination to continue their trek through the backlands of Brazil in their challenge to the country's ruling elites (pp. 210–11, 303).Cameras also recorded physical destruction of both rebels and the state. In a surrealistic photograph, a boy and a girl sitting in what seems to be a living room whose ceiling has been shattered by federal troop bombardments during the São Paulo revolt gaze passively into the lens with rubble all around them (p. 185). Out-of-focus 16 millimeter frames by an amateur filmmaker register the burning of the National Student Union headquarters in Rio de Janeiro during the 1964 military takeover (pp. 394–95). Papers are scattered all over the ground. Two young men are hurling something (are they rocks or firebombs?) into the burning building.The authors of the essays show the varied political uses of these images as they appeared in magazines and newspapers. Their narratives leave no doubt that one of the purposes of this collection is to reveal the raw nature of political violence that challenged “the social question”—that is, the demands for economic, social, and regional inclusion for those cast to the margins by sectors of society and a state that favored other social classes.One regrets that the volume stopped in 1964. Perhaps the images of Brazil's most recent military dictatorship are too familiar to a generation of intellectuals who might purchase the book. Yet in a moment when elected politicians and a new president have become dictatorship deniers, those photos documenting police repression and brutality during the two decades of military rule regrettably will become germane again and more potent, perhaps, than they were in the immediate past.

Common Sense & Pin Money: The Material Culture and Legacy of Lula Annie Butler 1909-2009

“Common Sense and Pin Money: The Material Culture and Legacy of Lula Annie Butler 1909-2009” examines local/global contexts of the late Mrs. Butler’s found quilts, her “make do” ethos, which made a way out of no way decades before recycle, re-purpose and green were hash tags. A lifelong Preston, Maryland resident and domestic worker, Mrs. Butler’s household was outfitted with quilts, tablecloths, aprons, pillows, and shopping bags she created from fabric-sample books and fabric remnants obtained from the late Mrs. Sarah Covey, her longest employer, who operated a drapery and upholstery business in Federalsburg, Maryland. Mrs. Butler’s artistic impulse-vibrant, improvisational, and individually expressive-is a thread of a rural Atlantic World continuum spanning from East Preston, Nova Scotia to Gee’s Bend, Alabama, all of which are transferences of African textile traditions. Like Harriet Ross Tubman, Mrs. Butler sold gingerbreads and quilts for income using skills she learned from her mother, Harriet Dyer Thomas, who learned from her mother Martha Adams Dyer, the earliest quilter, thus far, identified in this lineage of Eastern Shore women of Algonquin descent. Over three decades, Mrs. Butler made an unknown quantity of quilts to provide warmth for her family, friends, and fellow congregants at Mt. Calvary Methodist Church in Preston, Maryland. Nova Scotia, the Eastern Shore, and Gee’s Bend have isolative geographies. Preston and Gee’s Bend have approximately the same population but unlike the Alabama quilters’ collective and the African Nova Scotia Quilter’s Association, Mrs. Butler created her Chesapeake vernacular alone. Her strong alto voice, singing old hymns, emanated from her westward-facing bedroom on Newton Road as she sewed strips of cloth together at her teal-metal Singer sewing machine. This seer’s stitchery was a fabric scat embedded with a post-modern time line of textile arts in the United States.

The Green Cathedral: A Little Memoir of Working Class Suburban Hippie Surf Culture on the South Coast of New South Wales, Australia

Most people today, if they think about it at all, probably identify Australia’s counterculture as something primarily to do with Nimbin’s 1973 Aquarius Festival. That was certainly totally cool. However, there are other north coast New South Wales towns like Mullumbimby that also embraced a counterculture back in the 1970s - but were usually a bit more low-key about it all. And believe it or not - once upon a time - long before Billabong and Quicksilver and Mambo cashed-in on surf-culture big time - a vaguely creative down-at-heel anti-capitalist counterculture grew up in suburban Wollongong. Your mum made your board shorts and, even before modern sunscreen (apart from then totally uncool ‘Pink Zinc’) was invented, whipped up a ‘Grannie Hat” (which you rarely wore and regularly came home with sunburn all over your already badly sunburned face and shoulders) on her very old Singer sewing machine.

The Lady Makes Boots: Enid Justin and the Nocona Boot Company

The Lady Makes Boots:Enid Justin and the Nocona Boot Company Carol A. Lipscomb (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Bootmaker Enid Justin at a sewing machine in the stitching department of her new factory in June 1948. Enid Justin - Nocona Boot Company Collection (BA15), University of North Texas Special Collections. “Enid Justin started her career by stepping into a man’s shoes. Now thousands of men are stepping into hers.” —Fort Worth Star Telegram, July 18, 1968 The headline of the local newspaper announced in bold type “Nocona Boot Closing Down: Western legend comes to an end at 74 years.” On August 25, 1999, the last pair of Nocona boots rolled off the production line at the famous factory in Nocona, Texas. That day marked the end of a company whose reputation for producing quality boots was unsurpassed, and it left a small North Texas town without the institution that had defined it for three quarters of a century. The history of Nocona Boot Company is a shining example of American entrepreneurship, and its story is made even more exceptional by the fact that its founder and president was a woman.1 Enid Justin founded the Nocona Boot Company in 1925. Her business was not only successful; it set the standard for quality in the boot-making industry. Her story is one of vision, determination, hard work, and giving back to the community. It is also a story of one woman’s rise to success in an industry traditionally dominated by men. Enid’s life story and the history of her company are so intertwined that they must be told together. The residents of Nocona fondly called her Miss Enid. (Because there are so many Justin family members involved in the telling of her story, she will be referred to throughout as Enid.) At age thirteen, Enid quit school and went to work in her father’s shop; “Daddy Joe” Justin was a bootmaker. She was not a poor student—quite the contrary—but she was strong-willed. The year was 1907, and when the school superintendent learned that Enid had danced with a boy at a [End Page 43] birthday party, he suspended her for three weeks. When told of her punishment, Enid replied, “Anybody that thinks there’s a party going on in my own home and I’m going upstairs to go to bed has something else to think about!” In reflecting on that decision, she opined, “That wasn’t very smart, but I said it anyway … and I never bothered to go back to school.” That determination was a trait that remained with her throughout her life and ultimately served her well. In telling this story years later she questioned, “I don’t know why Mother and Daddy Joe didn’t make me go back,” but she speculated it was because they needed her help at the factory.2 Enid began working at her father’s boot shop after school and on Saturdays when she was just ten years old, and by age twelve she was stitching boot tops on an old foot-pedal Singer sewing machine. When she quit school, Enid became a full-time employee, and she was eager to learn all she could about the business her father started in 1879 in Spanish Fort, Texas.3 Enid’s father, Joe Justin, came to Texas by train from his family’s home in Lafayette, Indiana. After a two-year stay in Gainesville where he worked as a cobbler’s apprentice, Justin set out by wagon for Spanish Fort, a small community that bordered the Chisholm Trail. He carried a few tools of his new trade, enough leather to make one pair of boots, and twenty-five cents in shin-plasters, a form of paper currency widely circulated in frontier economies. He began doing shoe and boot repair in the shop of the town barber, Frank See, who was also a newcomer to Spanish Fort. See recognized Justin’s talent and loaned him thirty-five dollars to buy the hides he needed to start making boots. Justin opened his shop in a small vacant building just off the town square. He...

Multinationals and Gender: Singer Sewing Machine and Marketing in Mexico, 1890–1930

Headquartered in the United States, the Singer Sewing Machine Co. did business all around the world in the early twentieth century. It regularly encountered wars, economic nationalism, and revolutions; in response, it normally created subsidiaries or gave in to expropriation. After the revolution in Mexico (1910–1920), Singer's marketing organization maintained normal operations and even prospered. The company succeeded, in part, by constantly associating the sewing machine with the idea of “modern” womanhood in Revolutionary Mexico. By revealing Singer's marketing strategies and focusing on gender, this article shows that multinational corporations and Latin American governments were not always at odds and could sometimes forge a profitable relationship.

Marketing the Hearth: Ornamental Embroidery and the Building of the Multinational Singer Sewing Machine Company

This study examines the Singer Sewing Machine Company’s strategies for selling family sewing machines on a global scale. In marketing the sewing machine, the American-headquartered Singer focused on ornamental embroidery or “fancy” sewing, defining home sewing as art, to distance the company and the appliance from negative perceptions of women’s garment work as industrial manufacturing. Singer created its Embroidery Department in the early 1890s in response to consumers’ sewing preferences. The department reflects how the home became a site where global capitalism was constructed and articulated. Singer’s Embroidery Department had representatives in many countries, coordinating expositions and other advertising. In the case of Singer in Spain and the United States, women who took part in the department’s work were an essential part of the corporate-integrated operation. This article examines the relationship between Singer’s corporate strategies and gender and culture in Spain and the United States.

Marketing the Hearth: Ornamental Embroidery and the Building of the Multinational Singer Sewing Machine Company

This study examines the Singer Sewing Machine Company’s strategies for selling family sewing machines on a global scale. In marketing the sewing machine, the American-headquartered Singer focused on ornamental embroidery or “fancy” sewing, defining home sewing as art, to distance the company and the appliance from negative perceptions of women’s garment work as industrial manufacturing. Singer created its Embroidery Department in the early 1890s in response to consumers’ sewing preferences. The department reflects how the home became a site where global capitalism was constructed and articulated. Singer’s Embroidery Department had representatives in many countries, coordinating expositions and other advertising. In the case of Singer in Spain and the United States, women who took part in the department’s work were an essential part of the corporate-integrated operation. This article examines the relationship between Singer’s corporate strategies and gender and culture in Spain and the United States.

Space of Discipline and Governmentality: The Singer Sewing Machine Factory, Clydebank, in the Twentieth Century

This paper examines work at the Singer factory, Clydebank, in the first half of the twentieth century. It employs a geographical reading of the temporal and spatial strategies of worker control in the factory. Using both archival and oral history data to critique commonly accepted understandings of factory work, I argue that although the factory space can be read as disciplinary, this must not obscure the resistive spatial and social strategies employed by workers. I draw on Foucault's ideas of discipline and governmentality but also consider the arguments of commentators analysing the modern work space and the ways in which the worker may evade and display ambivalence towards discourses aimed at them.

Introduction: Fairy tales to digital games: the rising tide of entertainment education

Act one: fairy tales are more than true About a century ago, noted British author and novelist, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who had a gift for using proverbs, metaphors and allegories, wrote: 'Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten' (Chesterton in Medley 2012: 1). Chesterton's pithy sentence celebrates the potential that lurks in stories: the power to attract our attention, spark our imagination, and paint new scenarios of hope; the power to experience vicarious struggles and epic wins; the power to demonstrate how 'monsters'--whether personal or societal--can be overcome, vanquished. It distils the essence of the entertainment-education (EE) strategy in communication, capturing its purposive intent to vanquish societal 'monsters' like gender inequality, domestic violence, malnutrition, and suffering from HIV/AIDS. Chesterton's observations about the power of stories have stood the test of time. For millennia, storytelling, music, drama, dance and various folk genres have been used in societies for recreation, devotion, reformation and instructional purposes. The idea of purposive EE thus is not a new invention--it is timeless. However, EE as a purposive communication strategy is a relatively new concept in that its conscious use in print, radio, television, popular music, films and digital gaming has received attention only in the past few decades (Singhal & Rogers 1999; Singhal, Wang & Rogers 2013). Consider what might happen if 'fairy tales' hitch a ride on popular radio and television genres. Between 1969 and 1971, when Peru broadcast its 448-episode-long telenovela (television novel), Simplemente Maria (Simply Maria), millions of viewers followed the unfolding Cinderella-like tale. Maria, the main character, a poor migrant woman from the Andean region, worked as a maid in a rich city household, barely making ends meet. Seduced by a rich playboy, Maria became pregnant, lost her job and struggled to survive, but retained her 'never-say-die' attitude. She found another job, worked during the day, enrolled in adult literacy classes in the evening, and burned the midnight oil to sharpen her sewing skills with a Singer sewing machine (Singhal, Obregon & Rogers 1994). Slowly but steadily, Maria's struggles turned into small victories and, eventually, into a triumph of epic proportions. Maria became the country's leading fashion designer and married the love of her life--her literacy teacher, Maestro Esteban, to live happily ever after. All in a fictional story! Remarkably, in reality, Simplemente Maria attracted record audience ratings in Peru, making heavy profits for PANTEL, the programme's Peruvian producer. The sale of Singer sewing machines boomed in Peru. Unbelievably, the number of young girls enrolling in adult literacy and sewing classes rose sharply (Singhal & Rogers 1999). When Simplemente Maria was broadcast in other Latin-American nations, similar effects occurred. Audience identification with Maria was strong: she represented a Cinderella-like fairytale model for upward social mobility. What may have explained the audience popularity of Simplemente Maria? The character of Maria, some have argued, embodied the archetypical Cinderella-like heroic struggle against 'human monsters, ill-fortune, and poverty' (Singhal & Rogers 1999; Svenkerud, Rahoi & Singhal 1995). A hero in the classical Jungian sense, Maria does not let the monsters devour her; instead, she subdues and overcomes them. If G.K. Chesterton were to have witnessed the raging Simplemente Maria fever in Latin America in the 1970s, and its unsurpassed popularity with Eastern European audiences in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he would likely be smiling. For in the bowel of such fairy tales, some audience members find the nuggets, the scripts for vanquishing 'monsters'. …

From the Archive: “The Work!” A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop

From the Archive: “The Work!” A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop George Starbuck Reprinted with newly restored content from Issue 11 of Ploughshares, Spring 1977 (guest-edited by Jane Shore and DeWitt Henry) A gray late afternoon in winter. Elizabeth Bishop, dressed casually in a Harvard jersey, welcomes the interviewer and answers his polite questions about a gorgeous gilt mirror on her living room wall. Yes, it is Venetian, those little blackamoors are Venetian, but it was picked up at an auction in Rio de Janeiro. The interviewer, sure in advance this is nothing to have asked one of his favorite poets to do, squares away with his cassette recorder on the coffee table and pops a prepared question. A wonderful expanse of books fills the wall behind the sofa. Before long there is laughter. A good memory, the thought of a quirk or extravagance in someone she knows and likes, sets Miss Bishop off. The laughter is quick, sharp, deep. No way to transcribe it. [Editor’s Note: The original interview was cut and occasionally corrected by Elizabeth Bishop. For this reprint, we have used the original typescript, restoring all of the cuts and keeping the text closer to the recorded conversation. We have, however, left in any content that Bishop added to the typescript to elaborate a story or clarify her meaning, so the version that follows is a hybrid of the two versions. Many thanks to Lloyd Schwartz for telling us about the typescript and sending us a copy, as well as to Frank Bidart, Bishop’s executor. The original version of the interview, with all of Bishop’s changes, can be found on our Web site, http://pshares.org. Select Read by Issue and then navigate to Spring 1977.] George Starbuck: I did some research. I got out the travel book you wrote on commission for Time-Life Books. There’s geography too. [End Page 161] You tell such wonderful bright clear stories from the history of Brazil. Elizabeth Bishop: I can’t remember too much of that book. At least I choose not to. A lot of it was a catalog. It was edited by Time-Life Books and they changed a lot of it. And I have a lot more pictures. There’s one—I think the one of Dom Pedro [the last Emperor –ed.] and his official party taken in front of Niagara Falls? Well, there was another pair of those. But that one, I think, is really ironic. He traveled all around this country. And yet he had never been to Iguassu, which is—how much—ten times bigger than Niagara Falls. This was in 1876 and he went to the Philadelphia Centennial. Alexander Bell was there with his telephone—a very young man, whose invention hadn’t been used at all. And Dom Pedro ordered telephones for his summer palace, in Petropolis. He also thought that the ladies of his court didn’t have much to do, so he took them all back Singer sewing machines—which they didn’t like very much. Did you read in that Brazil book how Longfellow gave a dinner party for him in Cambridge? GS: Yes, and that Dom Pedro was fond of Whittier and translated some of his poems into Portuguese. EB: So I looked up some of these translations and I thought it would be poems about slavery because Dom Pedro was so very much against slavery. [Slavery existed in Brazil until 1888. –ed.] But they weren’t about slavery at all. They were poems about birds, nature poems. Poor Whittier was so shy and at the Longfellow dinner party, Dom Pedro, who was over six feet tall, strong and handsome, tried to give the Brazilian abraço, twice—and poor Whittier was frightened to death. GS: You take a set task, like that Time-Life book, and you make it wholly your own. [EB: Not wholly; say two-thirds.] It always seemed that you were just bursting to tell those stories. You’re that way with translations. I discovered something. I went into Geography III without stopping off at the Table of Contents, and so I went into the Joseph Cornell poem without...

A Sketch of My Life

I was born May 22, 1922, at home at 8530 Church Road in St. Louis, Missouri. Was the second child born to my parents, the first one having lived only a few hours. So I was thoroughly welcomed! My aunt and grandparents lived downstairs, and it was a big happy day for all of them (me too probably). I was healthy and feisty. My dad was a green grocer and butcher, and when I was 3 years old, we moved to Chicago, where he owned several meat markets and green grocers too. He kept almost all his money in the bank, and suddenly the banks closed. All his money was lost, except what little he had kept out. I was about 7 then and by this time had a little brother (4 years younger). To make ends meet, my mother made potato salad. My brother and I would take our Coaster Wagon and go across the street to the green grocer there and get potatoes. We would pull the wagon home, and Mom would make the potato salad, and Dad would sell it to hotels. I remember walking to school (there were no school buses and no snow days either), and when it had snowed, the snowbanks were higher than I could see over. I also remember that if I left my doll outside overnight, the moisture from Lake Michigan would have my doll all wet by morning. It was very hard to make a living, though, and my mother's sisters and parents wanted us to come back to St. Louis, where they could take care of us. So we did. Mom sewed for people with a Singer sewing machine. One day a man came by and said he worked for the Singer Company. He convinced her to buy a machine. She had to put $15 down on it. It was a tabletop machine. The top looked like a desk when it was closed (then one could lift the machine out), and it sat on top of the desk part. It had a foot pedal. I heard that machine going all the time. Mom sewed for people and also made our clothes. I watched over my brother and by now a sister, who was 8 years younger than me, to keep them busy and away from the machine. No notices came for a few months about where to send more money. So my mother finally called Singer Company. Singer said they had never heard of the man! He must have stolen the machines or something. So my mother made arrangements to pay Singer directly. I kept the machine after my mother died and just sold it in 2009! I graduated from high school in May 1939. However, while no one knew it at the time, I had gotten married in January 1939. My parents were trying to raise money for an organization, and a dance was held. I went and saw the love of my life immediately, Ralph. Ralph was 11 years older than I. We fell in love, and 3 months later we got married. In those days a person was not allowed to be married while in high school. So we kept it a secret. Ralph had written letters to me, though, and my mother found them, thereby finding out we were married! She was quite startled and angry at first, but then both she and my dad seemed okay with it actually. Then we had a Shiveree. As it was during the Depression, once it was discovered that we were married, we lived in the home of my parents. Ralph was in construction, a millwright. And as the war was building up, we traveled to assist in putting machines into factories. I stayed with my parents much of the time. However, at one point we all moved to Matagorda County, Texas, where I was expecting our third child! But my parents always wanted us to live with them so they could be close to our family. They helped us, and we helped them too. And what did I do? I took care of my family and helped my mom. When the children went into high school, I started working. I had quite a varied career. I worked at Famous Barr, helping to count the merchandise when it came in and made sure that the number of items matched the invoice. I sold opera tickets. I counted Eagle Stamp books to make sure no one cheated! I even got promoted. But after 5 years I decided that I didn't want to spend the rest of my time there, and I quit. …

Chandler's Living History:The Visible Handof Vertical Integration in Nineteenth Century America Viewed Under a Twenty‐First Century Transaction Costs Economics Lens

abstractAlfred Chandler's recent passing is cause to review and celebrate his many contributions to business history. It also presents an opportunity to highlight links between his rich historical analyses concerning organizational and industrial innovation and contemporary management studies of the firm and industrial organization. We illustrate this point by applying transaction costs theory to several case studies from his 1977 masterwork narrating the emergence of vertically‐integrated firms in nineteenth‐century America,The Visible Hand. Vertical integration, organizational control, and innovation in manufacturing at McCormick Harvester and Singer Sewing Machines, and in transportation and distribution at Swift and United Fruit reflect managerial responses to classic transaction costs considerations including commercial relationships requiring the creation of specialized equipment and knowledge. Transaction costs analysis provides complementary historical insight on organizational innovation at these and other firms in the nineteenth century, and suggests when and where we might expect vertical integration strategies in emerging industries of the twenty‐first century.

Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach and Its Implementation

All over the world, people are struggling for a life that is fully human, a life worthy of human dignity. Countries and states are often focused on economic growth alone, but their people, meanwhile, are striving for something different: they want meaningful human lives. They need theoretical approaches that can be allies in their struggles, not approaches that keep these struggles from view. As the late Mahbub Ul Haq wrote in 1990: The real wealth of a nation is its people. And the purpose of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy, and creative lives. This simple but powerful truth is too often forgotten in the pursuit of material and financial wealth. Consider Vasanti, a woman in her thirties, in the Indian state of Gujarat, whom I interviewed for my book Women and Human Development. Vasanti's husband was a gambler and an alcoholic. He used the household money to get drunk, and when he ran out of that money, he got a vasectomy in order to take the cash incentive payment offered by local government. So Vasanti had no children to help her. Eventually, as her husband became more abusive, she could no longer live with him, and returned to her own family. Her father, who used to make Singer sewing machine parts, had died, but her brothers were running an auto parts business in what was once his shop. Using one of her father's old machines, and living in the shop itself, she earned a small income making eyeholes for the hooks on sari tops. Meanwhile, her brothers gave her a loan to get another machine, one that rolls the edges of the sari. She took their money, but she didn't like being dependent on them-they were married and had children, and their support could have stopped at any time. With the help of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), therefore, she got a bank loan of her own and paid back the brothers. Now she has almost entirely paid back the SEWA loan itself. She can also enroll in SEWA's educational pro

Research Files: Discovering Gold in Baker County Library's Photograph Collection

RESEARCH FILES Discovering Gold in Baker County Library's Photograph Collection by GaryDielman HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHS CAN draw us into thepast likeAlice through the looking glass, but, like Alice in Lewis Carroll's Alice inWonderland, we have to be curious and the pho tograph has to invite that curiosity. One such photograph archived at the Baker County Library in Baker City shows an emigrant family, its covered wagon, and its collection of animals as they passed through Baker City in 1884. When the trailerspassed through Boise, Idaho, inOctober 1884,theBoise Democrat reported: "The wheelers were oxen, succeeded by the donkey mated also with an ox,which in turn was preceded by a horse led by aman. The oxen were no larger than the Burmese cow of traveling menager ies. The jack was about the size of a Newfoundland dog. The horse was also diminutive and seemed to be a collection of equine bones articulated for the occasion." The article reported that the group was from Texas and headed for the Willamette Valley. Let me draw you further into the photograph. The setting is the south west corner of what is known today as Old Post Office Square at the inter section ofMain and Auburn streets in downtown Baker City. In the far distance is the sagebrush-covered hill that forms the city's southwest sky line.A line of small, frame buildings forms the immediate backdrop. Sign boards jutting out over theboardwalk advertise "Singer Sewing Machines" and "Sam SingWashing & Ironing." Twenty-four localmen and boys pose behind the main subjects of thephoto graph: two adults, four children, their wagon, and their diverse collection of animals. The photographer had everyone's frozen attention, with the exception of thehorse,whose ears have a double image. The emigrant family is as diverse as itswagon team. A thin, warmly dressed, possibly toothless elderly woman holds the horse's reins. Her expression is at the same time grim 88 OHQ vol. 109, no. I ? 2008 Oregon Historical Society All photographs courtesyofBakerCounty Library Martin Mason Hazeltine captured thisimageofa family as it passed through Baker City in 1884with itscoveredwagon and diverse assortmentofdraftanimals. Martin (1827-1903) and hisyounger brother George "Irving" Hazeltine (1836-1918) learnedphotography in New YorkCity in 1852. A year later,they were operating a photography business inSan Francisco.Aftermaking his reputationas a scenic photographer all over the West and Alaska,Martin establisheda photography studio inBaker City. In 1862,his brotherjoined thegold rush towhat became Grant County,Oregon, where hemined as one of the first residentsofCanyon City; hewas laterelectedcountyjudge ofGrant County. and sad. In contrast, frontand center in the photograph is a young boy, perhaps eight or nine years old, strik ing a nonchalant one-legged pose with a hand resting on the donkey's rump. A slightly older boy, with his face obscured by a hatmade fora big ger head, stands shylyby thewagon's rearwheel. Seated on thewagon is a bearded old man who holds a whip that appears to be made of willow branch and rawhide. Beside him sits a concerned-looking girl of about six, and behind them, standing in thebed of the wagon, is a younger, tousle headed boy who looks intentlyat the camera from under his eyebrows. Presumably the four children are sib lings,but are the adults the children's parents or their grandparents? If they are grandparents, where are the parents? Ifindmyself drawn not only into the photograph but also into the lives of these strangers, and Iwant to learnmore about this intriguing slice of time on theOregon Trail. The Boise Democrat reported, "A liberal purse was made up for them by our citizens, and they moved onwestward no doubt carrying with them a tolerable fair opinion of Boise City." What you cannot see in thephoto graph isthephotographer's studio, just off the right edge of the photograph, where one of the West's most famous early photographers, Martin Mason Dielman, Baker County Library's Photograph Collection 89 Martin Hazeltine sphotography studio,established in 1884, was locatedon the southwestcornerof Main and Auburn streetsinBaker City. The front (east) end of thebuildingwas usedfor sales; the middle portionwith a largewindow and skylight on thenorthsidewas Hazeltine sportrait studio; and therearof thebuilding served as living...

The Clark brothers collect: Impressionist and early modern paintings

Brothers Sterling and Stephen Clark--heirs to the Singer sewing machine fortune--were among the twentieth century's most influential art collectors. This volume examines their magnificent collections, their personal lives and public profiles, and their significant roles in the history of American museums. While the brothers shared a love for great art, they collected in different ways. Sterling was a private collector; his French Impressionist masterpieces, including thirty-eight Renoirs, and works by such American artists as Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Frederic Remington, and Mary Cassatt now form the distinguished collection of the Clark. Stephen, a businessman and museum trustee, acquired modern works by such masters as Georges Seurat, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh, often with specific museum collections in mind--including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Handsomely produced, this book features over two hundred illustrations of the works from Sterling's and Stephen's collections. It also includes essays by distinguished scholars, an illustrated chronology, and a previously unpublished checklist of works purchased by Stephen Clark.

More About The Mongols: Chinese Porcelain From Asia To Europe

When I found a broken Chinese blue and white dish in the Singer Sewing Machine shop in Damascus in the 1960s, I had little idea what the consequences would be. (Plates A, B) The question as to why ...

How breakthroughs happen: the surprising truth about how companies innovate

This book presents lessons from the famous 'Invention Factories' past and present. Did you know that the incandescent lightbulb first emerged some thirty years before Thomas Edison famously 'turned night into day'? Or that Henry Ford's revolutionary assembly line came from an unlikely blend of observations from Singer sewing machines, meatpacking, and Campbell's Soup? In this fascinating study of innovation, engineer and social scientist Andrew Hargadon argues that our romantic notions about innovation as invention are actually undermining our ability to pursue breakthrough innovations. Based on ten years of study into the origins of historic inventions and modern innovations from the lightbulb to the transistor to the Reebok Pump athletic shoe, How Breakthroughs Happen takes us beyond the simple recognition that revolutionary innovations do not result from flashes of brilliance by lone inventors or organizations. In fact, innovation is really about creatively recombining ideas, people, and objects from past technologies in ways that spark new technological revolutions. This process of 'technology brokering' is so powerful, explains Hargadon, because it exploits the networked nature--the social side--of the innovation process. Moving between historical accounts of labs and factory floors where past technological revolutions originated and field studies of similar processes in today's organizations, Hargadon shows how technology brokers create an enduring capacity for breakthrough innovations. Technology brokers simultaneously bridge the gaps in existing networks that separate distant industries, firms, and divisions to see how established ideas can be applied in new ways and places, and build new networks to guide these creative recombinations to mass acceptance. How Breakthroughs Happen identifies three distinct strategies for technology brokering that managers can implement in their organizations. Hargadon suggests that Edison and his counterparts were no smarter than the rest of us-they were simply better at moving through the networked world of their time. Intriguing, practical, and counterintuitive, How Breakthroughs Happen can help managers transform their own firms into modern-day invention factories.