Industrial Age History

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society’s members.

The groundbreaking people, ideas, and inventions of the Industrial Revolution, spanning from 1760 to 1840, are brought to life in this fascinating addition to the New York Times bestselling What Was? series. Following the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution was a global period of...

In current debates about globalization, open and borderless elites are often set in opposition to the immobile and protectionist working classes. This view obscures a major historical fact: for around a century—from the 1860s to the 1970s—worker movements were at the cutting edge of internationalism. The creation in London of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 was a turning point. In this urgent, engaging work, historian Nicolas Delalande explores how international worker solidarity developed.

For the captains of industry ? men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Henry Ford ? the Gilded Age is a time of big money. Technology boomed with the invention of trains, telephones, electric lights, harvesters, vacuum cleaners, and more. But for millions of immigrant workers, it is a time of big struggles, with adults and children alike working 12 to 14 hours a day under extreme, dangerous conditions.