Color photograph of a steelworker in protective clothing

One of the oldest trade associations in the United States has a home at Hagley Library. Our American Iron and Steel Institute photographs and audiovisual materials (Accession: 1986.268) collection consists of photographs, research notes, audio, film, and video documenting the Institute and the history of the North American iron and steel industry.

The American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) was established under the leadership of United States Steel Corporation co-founder and chairman Elbert H. Gary (1846-1927) in 1908 after the Panic of 1907 brought an end to industry-wide consolidations. But its precursors date back to 1855, starting with the American Iron Association, which became the American Iron and Steel Association in 1864 following the American adoption of the Bessemer steel-making process.

Isabelle Marina Held will offer our second author talk on December 3. Her book, Atomic Bombshells: How Plastics Shaped Postwar Bodies, deftly traces how nylon and other technologies moved from wartime use into domestic life.

The first author talk of the fall on Thursday October 8 will be offered by Dylan Gottlieb on his new book, Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York.

Let’s say that poison gas leaks from a plant, sickening workers and residents. Should OSHA investigate, or the EPA? Who is responsible when both agencies have a claim to jurisdiction? The American federal government regulates the workplace and the environment separately, despite their material inseparability, that the workplace is part of the environment. How and why did the American regulatory landscape come to have this awkward and contradictory split?

This manuscript (a chapter of my book in progress) uses two early examples of installation of AC systems to explore the priorities of those who invested in it. Both instances took place in 1902. That year, Alfred Wolff received approval to place his AC system into the New York Stock Exchange (for worker comfort) and Willis Carrier installed the world’s first modern AC system at a Brooklyn factory (to stabilize product).

This chapter tells a parochial story of how Luzerne County was remade as a site for “capital formation” by the activities of holding companies in the 1950s and 1960s, laying groundwork to explain how Salem Township became ripe for predation in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Previous speculative frenzies transformed the social fabric along the North Branch. The Connecticut Susquehanna Company colonization of the Wyoming Valley sparked agrarian settler violence feeding the post-Revolutionary “land mania” of the 1790s.

This paper examines how software known as honeypots—deceptive digital systems designed to turn the technique of “social engineering” on hackers—transformed the political economy of expertise in cybersecurity from the mid-1990s through the mid-2010s.

Black and white photograph of a 1930s movie theatre on a commercial street.
Movie theater "dish nights" like the one advertised in this ca. 1936 photograph of Miller's State Theatre were once a popular sales incentive that originated in the Great Depression. While the film industry had boomed in the years before the stock market crash of October 1929, economic uncertainty meant that, by the end of 1933, ticket sales had declined sharply, with weekly attendance numbers dropping about 45% nationwide.
 
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