Winner of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for General Engineering from the Association of American Publishers Originally published in 1996. By applying their abundant natural resources to ironmaking early in the eighteenth century, Americans soon made themselves felt in world markets. After the Revolution, ironmakers supplied the materials necessary to the building of American industry, pushing the fuel efficiency and productivity of their furnaces far ahead of their European rivals. In American Iron, 1607-1900, Robert B. Gordon draws on recent archaeological findings as well as archival research to present an ambitious, comprehensive survey of iron technology in America from the colonial period to the industry's demise at about the turn of the twentieth century. Closely examining the techniques—the "hows"—of ironmaking in its various forms, Gordon offers new interpretations of labor, innovation, and product quality in ironmaking, along with references to the industry's environmental consequences. He establishes the high level of skills required to ensure efficient and safe operation of furnaces and to improve the quality of iron product. By mastering founding, fining, puddling, or bloom smelting, ironworkers gained a degree of control over their lives not easily attained by others.
Tulane is the story of a southern school striving for national recognition in the post–World War II era of American research universities. Clarence L. Mohr and Joseph E. Gordon pre-sent a candid, in-depth treatment of the 150-year-old New Orleans institution during this transformative period, when it grappled with such pervasive issues as federal and private funding; academic freedom; an enrollment surge set in motion by the GI Bill and sustained by the postwar “baby boom”; the cold war; desegregation; the antiwar, civil rights, and student-power movements; expanding intercollegiate athletics; censorship; the clash between liberal and utilitarian conceptions of higher learning; revision of curricular content; and the role of universities as platforms for social criticism—all of which together profoundly altered the mission of American higher learning. In addition to these external forces, the authors examine the many individuals—administrators, professors, and students—whose responses in both calm and crises shaped the evolution of Tulane’s unique academic, physical, and demographic design. Like its regional peers in the 1950s and 1960s, Tulane faced the challenge of transcending its past without repudiating traditions of lasting value. From a loose confederation of locally oriented undergraduate and professional schools, it developed into a nationally focused research university serving a diverse student body selected through rigorous admissions standards. Its journey over the past half century should remind those who support, study, or teach in American universities that their own institutions during that period have in a very real sense made history as well.
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