A rich history of the unique relationship between life and work in an American factory town from 1840 to 1984, A Place to Live and Work tells the remarkable story of Henry Disston's saw manufacturing company and the factory town he built. The book provides a rare view of the rise of one of America's largest and most powerful family-owned businesses, from its modest beginnings in 1840 to the 1940s, when Disston products were known worldwide, to the sale and demise of the company in the postwar years. Henry Disston, however, not only built a factory; he also shaped Tacony, the town in northeastern Philadelphia where the workers lived. The book describes the company's interdependence with the community and profiles the lifestyle that grew out of Disston's paternalistic blueprint for Tacony. Using original letter books, shop committee meeting notes, photographs, and a wealth of other documents, Harry Silcox reveals Disston's highly sophisticated distribution and marketing system as well as a management system that, unlike the one advocated by Frederick Winslow Taylor, responded to the concerns of workers and foremen. Through two world wars, the Depression, and the rise of unions, Disston's innovative business practices enabled the company to remain active and strong even when factories across the nation were failing. This study raises important questions about the demise of the factory system and its impact on urban communities and family life. The Disston company provides one example of how people could work and live together successfully within the larger framework of the factory system.

Making Arms in the Machine Age traces the growth and development of the United States Arsenal at Frankford, Pennsylvania, from its origin in 1816 to 1870. During this period, the arsenal evolved from a small post where skilled workers hand-produced small arms ammunition to a full-scale industrial complex employing a large civilian workforce. James Farley uses the history of the arsenal to examine larger issues including the changing technology of early nineteenth-century warfare, the impact of new technology on the United States Army, and the reactions of workers and their families and communities to the coming of industrialization. Shortly after the War of 1812, the U. S. Army founded several new arsenals, including Frankford, to build up supplies of arms and ammunition then in short supply. At that time, the Army was held in low regard because of its perceived poor performance in the war, so the arrival of arsenals was not welcomed. By 1870, however, the arsenal at Frankford had integrated itself into the community and become a valued and respected member of it. Farley argues that the Ordnance Department of the U. S. Army created an industrial system of manufacture at Frankford well in advance of private industry. He also contends that the evolution of the Army into an employer of a large-scale civilian workforce helped to end the isolation and anti-militarism that plagued it after the War of 1812. Farley's study joins recent work in the history of technology, such as Judith McGaw's That Wonderful Machine, that seeks to understand technological change in its social and cultural context.

The Sellers brothers, Samuel and George, came to North America in 1682 as part of the Quaker migration to William Penn’s new province on the shores of the Delaware River. Across more than two centuries, the Sellers family—especially Samuel’s descendants Nathan, Escol, Coleman, and William—rose to prominence as manufacturers, engineers, social reformers, and urban and suburban developers, transforming Philadelphia into a center of industry and culture. They led a host of civic institutions including the Franklin Institute, Abolition Society, and University of Pennsylvania. At the same time, their vast network of relatives and associates became a leading force in the rise of American industry in Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee, New York, and elsewhere.Engineering Philadelphia is a sweeping account of enterprise and ingenuity, economic development and urban planning, and the rise and fall of Philadelphia as an industrial metropolis. Domenic Vitiello tells the story of the influential Sellers family, placing their experiences in the broader context of industrialization and urbanization in the United States from the colonial era through World War II. The story of the Sellers family illustrates how family and business networks shaped the social, financial, and technological processes of industrial capitalism. As Vitiello documents, the Sellers family and their network profoundly influenced corporate and federal technology policy, manufacturing practice, infrastructure and building construction, and metropolitan development. Vitiello also links the family’s declining fortunes to the deindustrialization of Philadelphia—and the nation—over the course of the twentieth century.

Although much has been written about elite Philadelphians, only in recent decades have historians paid attention to the Jews and working-class blacks, the immigrant Irish, Italians, and Poles who settled in the city and gave such sections as Moyamensing, Southwark, South Philadelphia, and Kensington their vitality. In this classic of social and ethnic history, the authors draw on census schedules, court records, city directories, and tax records as well as newspaper files and other sources to give a picture of the ways in which these less-privileged groups of Philadelphians lived. What emerges is a picture of Philadelphia radically different from the conventional portrait of a staid old city.

Urban historians have long portrayed suburbanization as the result of a bourgeois exodus from the city, coupled with the introduction of streetcars that enabled the middle class to leave the city for the more sylvan surrounding regions. Demonstrating that this is only a partial version of urban history, "Manufacturing Suburbs" reclaims the history of working-class suburbs by examining the development of industrial suburbs in the United States and Canada between 1850 and 1950. Contributors demonstrate that these suburbs developed in large part because of the location of manufacturing beyond city limits and the subsequent building of housing for the workers who labored within those factories. Through case studies of industrial suburbanization and industrial suburbs in several metropolitan areas (Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, and Montreal), "Manufacturing Suburbs" sheds light on a key phenomenon of metropolitan development before the Second World War.