Books
Hiding in Plain Sight
The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: With a Preface written in 1892 by Frederick Engels
How did I not known that this was written about Manchester and the working poor in 1844?
William Bence (1828-1900) was born in Stockport, Lancashire, England. He and his family lived in Heaton-Norris in the 1840s and early 1850s. William, two brothers, his wife, and a sister all worked in the cotton mills. They emigrated en masse to Fall River, Massachusetts in 1854.To understand their lives and why they emigrated, I’ve been looking for contemporary accounts of life working in the mills and in the Manchester / Stockport area.
Listening Now – Albion’s Seed
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, Vol. 1 by David Hackett Fischer
This is an eye-opening (for me) analysis of the settlement of four regions of early America – New England, the Chesapeake, the Delaware Valley, and the Appalachian back country – and how the differences in their origins echo down to the present day.
