Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution

Stacks of stone preside over many bucolic and wooded landscapes in the mid-Atlantic states. Initially constructed more than two hundred years ago, they housed blast furnaces that converted rock and wood into the iron that enabled the United States to secure its national independence. By the eve of the Revolutionary War, furnaces and forges in the American colonies turned out one-seventh of the world's iron.

Forging America illuminates the fate of labor in an era when industry, manhood, and i...