According to the United Nations, 40,000 children work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mining for the mineral cobalt. They work for up to 12 hours a day under dangerous conditions that can be deadly when they have to go underground.
Americans may be partly responsible for their work.
Cobalt is an essential ingredient of most electric vehicle batteries, and demand for electric vehicles is growing. The U. S government is promoting and subsidizing EVs. Recently, in a House-passed infrastructure bill, a Republican congressman tried to ban the purchase of battery ingredients that depend on child labor. His amendment was struck down.
Around 1780, thousands of children as young as 5 or 6 years old began to work 12 hours or more daily in British textile mills.[1] Can we learn something from that experience?
Children had always been expected to work in England, often for long hours, but the mechanized factories brought them out of homes and workshops. The textile mills didn’t need brawn; owners wanted women and children to monitor the moving machines and piece together broken threads. Their work cost less than men’s and they were more docile. Continue reading “Child Labor—in the Congo and in the Industrial Revolution”
It’s Bastille Day. Read about the French Revolution, in context, by a British professor of history writing for the BBC’s History Extra.
Hamilton the movie doesn’t represent Hamilton the man, says Phil Magness in Independent Review.
Why did the French army fold in 1940? Or did it? Robert J. Young calls the story of French military weakness “misremembering” and writes about it in two essays (here and here) on the History News Network.
An amazing historical find: The dispute over the Freedmen’s statue leads to discovery of a letter about the statue by Frederick Douglass (he disliked it). In the Wall Street Journal.
“We shall overcome.” Black Americans overcame, and Walter Williams explains why “as a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles, and in a shorter span of time than any other racial group in history.”
In studying British history, I’ve come across female British historians of the early twentieth century who helped develop economic history as a discipline. They were intellectuals; we’d call them “blue-stockings” in the United States (a few were also elegant), and they tended to delve deeply into regional archives.
Julia Mann, for example, was the expert on Britain’s pre-industrial textile industry; Ivy Pinchbeck wrote a pioneering volume about how women’s lives were changed by the Industrial Revolution; and Pat Hudson practically owned the history of woolen textiles, Britain’s largest industry before the Industrial Revolution.
I recently read a 1992 essay by Maxine Berg indicating that these historians, while well-regarded, were not taken as seriously as they should have been. [1] Berg suggests that such inattention may distort our understanding of the historiography of Britain.
I realize that historiography—the study of what historians write—may not appeal much to my readers, but that is what my master’s thesis is about. Specifically, I’m looking at what historians have said about labor conditions in the Industrial Revolution (1750-1850) and how their views changed over the years. Thus I need to know which historians helped paint the picture accurately.
In 2012 President Obama outraged many people when he tried to argue for the value of government by saying, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” His statement was wrong because, of course, you did build that.
But that doesn’t mean that you had no help. For many of us, that help goes back perhaps hundreds of years.
In my last post I wrote about some of the family histories my readers have sent me. I was struck by how “middle-class” their families were, even 100 or 150 years ago. I concluded that if you are a successful professional today, chances are good that you have a family history with a lot of solid middle-class people behind you, people who worked hard, sometimes back-breaking hard, who gave up leisure, and who sought education for themselves or their children.
That doesn’t mean your family history didn’t have some cads and misfits (mine did) but the general direction was toward discipline.
In other words, we have a cloud of witnesses who have predated us. Perhaps we received material goods from those ancestors, but far more important were the habits of mind—the mental strength that allows us to give up short-term rewards in the hope of longer-term gains. Continue reading “Middle-class at Heart (Part II)”
In studying British history, I’ve come across female British historians of the early twentieth century who helped develop economic history as a discipline. They were intellectuals; we’d call them “blue-stockings” in the United States (a few were also elegant), and they tended to delve deeply into regional archives.