Fotografía de autor
6+ Obras 525 Miembros 9 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Incluye los nombres: Joshua B. Freeman, Joshua Benjamin Freeman

También incluye: Joshua Freeman (1)

Obras de Joshua Benjamin Freeman

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To much history and too little (next to none) of technology, psychology or sociology.
 
Denunciada
Paul_S | 6 reseñas más. | Dec 23, 2020 |
Joshua Freeman's book provides a comprehensive overview of American history since World War II. He organizes his narrative around three themes: the postwar growth enjoyed by the American economy, the transformation of democracy within the United States, and the expanded relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. Through them, he examines the impact of events over the course of the latter half of the 20th century. His coverage is surprisingly thorough, extending over the political, economic, and social events and trends the nation experienced. Nor does he confine his account to a purely national history, as he also touches on the regional developments taking place that all too many national histories address only in passing. All of this makes Freeman's book the best single-volume survey of the United States in the second half of the 20th century, one that will likely serve as the standard by which future such treatments are measured.… (más)
 
Denunciada
MacDad | otra reseña | Mar 27, 2020 |
The mark of a good non-fiction book for me is not only how in depth the author goes into a topic, or how informative, but whether I learned something new. With Behemoth, Joshua Freeman dives into the history of the modern factory, from its earliest days in the cotton and silk mills of England to today’s massive city-sized factories that churn out cell phones, shoes, and everything else we consume in the 21st Century. Freeman takes us on a tour that not only looks at the development of the factory and how it reshaped manufacturing, but how the factory sparked social change. The factory ushered in great innovations for providing the goods people needed, it also gave rise to the middle class while at the same time shining a spotlight on the disparities between the workers and the owners. Freeman does a great job of showing these differences and how social change grew out of the mechanized changes to make factories bigger and more efficient.

I recommend Behemoth for anybody interested in not only history, but who have an interest in how our modern world – from the stuff we make and buy, to how our society developed – came about.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
GeoffHabiger | 6 reseñas más. | Sep 25, 2019 |
The particular value of this book is the way that Freeman weaves together some bodies of knowledge that are usually not combined in terms of looking at labor history, business, history of technology and the aesthetics of modernity. As to why there should have been giant factories in the first place much of this seems to boil down to a question of maximizing the limited number of sites that provided sufficient water power and to protect intellectual property, but it soon dawned on factory owners that these installations could provide them physical security and social control over their workforce. At the very start Freeman takes some pains to remind his readers of what an authoritarian society Great Britain was well into the nineteenth century and the factory as an authoritarian environment of social control probably is the greatest theme of the book.

Moving there from the rise of the machine as a symbol of man’s Promethean ambitions (there is an extensive examination of the great industrial exhibitions of the nineteenth century), through the heyday of Henry Ford as a symbol of achievement and into the Stalinist celebration of the giant factory as an exemplar of civilizational accomplishment, Freeman winds up with a consideration of what the giant factory means today. The short answer would seem to be not as much as one might think.

In considering the great consumer production centers of China as models of Third World industrialization, Freeman observes that there is little of the triumphalist image that previous expressions of the giant factory generated. These black boxes (investigative access is very limited) for grinding out cheap consumer goods are recognized as being no longer the commanding heights of national expression and power and are merely way stations on the way to whatever post-industrial society looks like.

As for what that future might be Freeman notes that the triumph of the great factory systems were based on the extensive use of resources (particularly of the human variety), which no longer seems viable. On the other hand, the continuing lesson of the rise of the great industrial systems is that they demonstrated that the world could be remade in a new image and if this could be done once it can be done again.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
Shrike58 | 6 reseñas más. | Aug 1, 2019 |

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Estadísticas

Obras
6
También por
3
Miembros
525
Popularidad
#47,377
Valoración
3.9
Reseñas
9
ISBNs
25
Idiomas
2

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