Other Topics: General | Standard of Living | Productivity | Lowell and the Early Textile Mills | Pope and the American System of Manufactures | DEC and the Computer in New England

Books

The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove by William Moran. Thomas Dunne Books, 2002.
Written as a popular history, not a scholarly work, this book tells the story of the rise and fall of the textile industry and the social changes it wrought.

The Boston Money Tree by Russell B. Adams Jr. Thomas Y. Crowell Co, 1977.
This book chronicles in an engaging style the story of how fortunes were made and spent by the first families of Boston from colonial times through the post World War II period.

The Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made by Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. Harvard University Press, 1987 (Harvard Studies in Business History, no. 40)
Tells the story of the pioneer entrepreneurs of the Massachusetts textile industry, covering the foundation of the Waltham mills and the entrepreneurs’ investments in ancillary fields.

Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community 1700–1850, edited by Conrad Edick Wright and Kathryn P. Viens. Northeastern University Press, 1997. (Massachusetts Historical Society Studies in American History and Culture, no. 4)
A broad survey of Boston business history including essays on 18th century women shopkeepers and African American businessmen in the antebellum period.

Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England by Naomi R. Lamoreaux. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
In early nineteenth century New England, insider lending was a legal and integral part of the banking system and enabled banks to play an important role in financing economic development.

Other Readings

"The New England Textile Industry, 1825-60: Trends and Fluctuations," by Lance E. Davis and H.Louis Stettler III. National Bureau of Economic Research, Output Employment and Productivity in the United States after 1800, Studies in Income and Wealth, Volume 30, pp. 215–242.

"Inequities in the Standard of Living in the United States, 1798-1875," by
Lee Soltow. National Bureau of Economic Research, American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War, pp. 121-71.

"Invention, Innovation, and Manufacturing Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Northeast," by Kenneth L. Sokoloff. National Bureau of Economic Research, American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War, pp. 345-384.

Videotapes

Mill Times,Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) video by David Macaulay.

“Preserving Old Mills and Mill History,” Along the Blackstone, Show #511.