Americas Assembly Line

Download or read book America's Assembly Line written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Model T to today's "lean manufacturing": the assembly line as crucial, yet controversial, agent of social and economic transformation. The mechanized assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and satirized. (We can still picture Chaplin's little tramp trying to keep up with a factory conveyor belt.) In America's Assembly Line, David Nye examines the industrial innovation that made the United States productive and wealthy in the twentieth century. The assembly line—developed at the Ford Motor Company in 1913 for the mass production of Model Ts—first created and then served an expanding mass market. It also transformed industrial labor. By 1980, Japan had reinvented the assembly line as a system of “lean manufacturing”; American industry reluctantly adopted the new approach. Nye describes this evolution and the new global landscape of increasingly automated factories, with fewer industrial jobs in America and questionable working conditions in developing countries. A century after Ford's pioneering innovation, the assembly line continues to evolve toward more sustainable manufacturing.

Download or read book The Color Line and the Assembly Line written by Elizabeth Esch and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Color Line and the Assembly Line tells a new story of the impact of mass production on society. Global corporations based originally in the United States have played a part in making gender and race everywhere. Focusing on Ford Motor Company’s rise to become the largest, richest, and most influential corporation in the world, The Color Line and the Assembly Line takes on the traditional story of Fordism. Contrary to popular thought, the assembly line was perfectly compatible with all manner of racial practice in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa. Each country’s distinct racial hierarchies in the 1920s and 1930s informed Ford’s often divisive labor processes. Confirming racism as an essential component in the creation of global capitalism, Elizabeth Esch also adds an important new lesson showing how local patterns gave capitalism its distinctive features.

Download or read book The Foreman on the Assembly Line written by Charles R. Walker and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover page -- Halftitle page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- CONTENTS -- 1 INTRODUCTION -- 2 THE FOREMAN AND THE PRINCIPLES OF MASS PRODUCTION -- 3 THE FOREMAN AND THE WORKER -- 4 THE FOREMAN AND MANAGEMENT -- 5 THE FOREMAN AND PRODUCTION -- 6 THE FOREMAN AND QUALITY -- 7 THE FOREMAN MEETS EMERGENCIES -- 8 A FOREMAN'S DAY -- 9 PROFILE OF A FOREMAN -- 10 MASS PRODUCTION AND THE INDIVIDUAL -- 11 MASS PRODUCTION AND THE GROUP -- 12 THE PROBLEM IN PERSPECTIVE -- SUPPLEMENT -- A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

Download or read book This America: The Case for the Nation written by Jill Lepore and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection One of President Bill Clinton’s “Best Things I’ve Read This Year” From the acclaimed historian and New Yorker writer comes this urgent manifesto on the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century. At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America, a follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States, These Truths. With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates nationalism here by explaining its long history—and the history of the idea of the nation itself—while calling for a “new Americanism”: a generous patriotism that requires an honest reckoning with America’s past. Lepore begins her argument with a primer on the origins of nations, explaining how liberalism, the nation-state, and liberal nationalism, developed together. Illiberal nationalism, however, emerged in the United States after the Civil War—resulting in the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the restriction of immigration. Much of American history, Lepore argues, has been a battle between these two forms of nationalism, liberal and illiberal, all the way down to the nation’s latest, bitter struggles over immigration. Defending liberalism, as This America demonstrates, requires making the case for the nation. But American historians largely abandoned that defense in the 1960s when they stopped writing national history. By the 1980s they’d stopped studying the nation-state altogether and embraced globalism instead. “When serious historians abandon the study of the nation,” Lepore tellingly writes, “nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism.” But liberalism is still in there, Lepore affirms, and This America is an attempt to pull it out. “In a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way to fight the forces of prejudice, intolerance, and injustice than by a dedication to equality, citizenship, and equal rights, as guaranteed by a nation of laws.” A manifesto for a better nation, and a call for a “new Americanism,” This America reclaims the nation’s future by reclaiming its past.

Download or read book From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 written by David Hounshell and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David A. Houndshell's widely acclaimed history explores the American "genius for mass production" and races its origins in the nineteenth-century "American system" of manufacture. Previous writers on the American system have argued that the technical problems of mass production had been solved by armsmakers before the Civil War. Drawing upon the extensive business and manufacturing records if leading American firms, Hounshell demonstrates that the diffusion of arms production technology was neither as fast now as smooth as had been assumed. Exploring the manufacture of sewing machines and furniture, bicycles and reapers, he shows that both the expression "mass production" and the technology that lay behind it were developments of the twentieth century, attributable in large part to the Ford Motor Company. Hounshell examines the importance of individuals in the diffusion and development of production technology and the central place of marketing strategy in the success of selected American manufacturers. Whereaas Ford was the seedbed of the assembly line revolution, it was General motors that initiated a new era with its introduction of the annual model change. With the new marketing strategy, the technology of "the changeover" became of paramount importance. Hounshell chronicles how painfully Ford learned this lesson and recounts how the successful mass production of automobiles led to the establishment of an "ethos of mass production," to an era in which propoments of "Fordism" argued that mass production would solve all of America's social problems.

Download or read book Electrifying America written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1990 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how electricity seeped into and redefined American culture, becoming fundamental to modern life.

Download or read book The American Auto Factory written by Byron Olsen and published by Motorbooks. This book was released on 2002 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witness the evolution of the American auto factory beginning with the basic hand-built assembly of cars built in the earliest part of the twentieth century, through the age of the assembly line, up to today's robotically-operated lines. Large photographs of the assembly lines in action send readers into nostalgic old factories. See the workers, the tools, the methods and the machines that combined their efforts with the ingenuity of industry players like Henry Ford, Ransom Olds. Walter Chrysler, and others to make possible the automobile's worldwide proliferation and availability. Flash back in time to witness the factories decade by decade in never-before published vintage photographs. Featured automakers include Ford, GM and Chrysler, along with smaller companies like Packard, Studebaker, Duesenberg and Auburn. Significant automotive industry events of the past combined with today's technological advances deliver a dynamic photographic look at the auto factories of yesterday and today.