"In 1883, the Brotherhood of Telegraphers, a nationwide union affiliated with the Knights of Labor, began what proved to be an unsuccessful strike against Western Union. The strike was well publicized, for it pitted a new group of middle-class employees against an enormous corporation headed by Jay Gould. Using the strike as a starting point, [the author] has written a social history of American telegraphy in the late nineteenth century, exploring the backgrounds, values, and experiences of the men and women who worked as operators."--Page 4 of cover.

This three-volume set concludes ABC-CLIO's groundbreaking series on the Industrial Revolution as it played out in the United States, offering volumes on the communications industry and the agriculture and meatpacking industries—plus a concluding overview volume on the causes, courses, and interconnections among the industries that brought such dramatic change to our lives. The concluding three-volume set in ABC-CLIO's landmark Industrial Revolution in America series offers vivid reminders of how this economic renaissance changed virtually every facet of American life. Communications takes readers from the telegraph to the telephone and beyond, showing how improvements in communication (aided by better transportation) helped create a truly national marketplace. Agriculture and Meatpacking details the shift of agriculture from family farms and local trade to mass production and agribusiness, sparking the development of a full range of farm machinery and spawning the rise of a new metropolis practically overnight. The concluding Overview/Comparison volume looks at the Industrial Revolution as a whole—revealing the impact of various industries on each other and gauging the revolution's broader social and political legacy in the United States and around the world.

Before the widespread popularity of automobiles, buses, and trucks, freight and passenger trains bound the nation together. The Station Agent and the American Railroad Experience explores the role of local frontline workers that kept the country's vast rail network running. Virtually every community with a railroad connection had a depot and an agent. These men and occasionally women became the official representatives of their companies and were highly respected. They met the public when they sold tickets, planned travel itineraries, and reported freight and express shipments. Additionally, their first-hand knowledge of Morse code made them the most informed in town. But as times changed, so did the role of, and the need for, the station agent. Beautifully illustrated with dozens of vintage photographs, The Station Agent and the American Railroad Experience, brings back to life the day-to-day experience of the station agent and captures the evolution of railroad operations as technology advanced.

The nineteenth century saw not only the emergence of the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter but also a fascination with séances and occult practices like automatic writing as a means for contacting the dead. Like the new technologies, modern spiritualism promised to link people separated by space or circumstance; and like them as well, it depended on the presence of a human medium to convey these conversations. Whether electrical or otherworldly, these communications were remarkably often conducted—in offices, at telegraph stations and telephone switchboards, and in séance parlors—by women. In The Sympathetic Medium, Jill Galvan offers a richly nuanced and culturally grounded analysis of the rise of the female medium in Great Britain and the United States during the Victorian era and through the turn of the century. Examining a wide variety of fictional explorations of feminine channeling (in both the technological and supernatural realms) by such authors as Henry James, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Marie Corelli, and George Du Maurier, Galvan argues that women were often chosen for that role, or assumed it themselves, because they made at-a-distance dialogues seem more intimate, less mediated. Two allegedly feminine traits, sympathy and a susceptibility to automatism, enabled women to disappear into their roles as message-carriers.Anchoring her literary analysis in discussions of social, economic, and scientific culture, Galvan finds that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminization of mediated communication reveals the challenges that the new networked culture presented to prevailing ideas of gender, dialogue, privacy, and the relationship between body and self.

Includes separately paged "Junior union section."

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