Howell John Harris

Inventing the U.S. Stove Industry, c.1815–1875: Making and Selling the First Universal Consumer Durable

This article examines the emergence of the American stove industry, detailing the complex interactions among changes in the product, the organization of production, and the methods of selling cast-iron heating and cooking equipment to consumers nationwide, particularly in the antebellum years. This highly competitive industry, composed of hundreds of proprietary firms, became a site of considerable innovation in marketing. Manufacturers integrated forward, controlling the sale and distribution of their goods through networks of small retailers nationwide. The article explains how and why.

Coping with Competition: Cooperation and Collusion in the US Stove Industry, c.1870–1930

This article examines the attempts of several generations of manufacturers of cooking and heating appliances to manage competition in their very unconcentrated industry. They started with overt price-fixing, which soon failed, then moved on to a variety of more effective techniques—particularly joint regulation with the aid of a strong craft union, and the adoption of uniform cost-accounting and price-setting systems. The article illuminates the numerous ways in which a trade association could make cartel-like behavior work in an industry whose structural characteristics were apparently unfavorable and also the importance of state intervention to shaping and eventually limiting this strategy.

Interwar American histories : left, right, and wrong.

Purchasing power: consumer organizing, gender, and the Seattle labor movement, 1919–1929 . By Dana Frank. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xii+349. ISBN 0-521-38367-6. £50.00. Paperback 0-521-46714-4. £16.95. New Deals: business, labor, and politics in America, 1920–1935 . By Colin Gordon. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xii+329. ISBN 0-521-45122-1. £40.00. Paperback 0-521-45755-6. £15.95. The long war: the intellectual Peoples Front and anti-Stalinism, 1930–1940 . By Judy Kutulas. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv+334. ISBN 0-8223-1526-2.

Labor History symposium: assessing Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage, after 30 years

39.95 Paperback 0-8223-1524-6. £16.95. The invisible empire in the West: toward a new historical appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s . Ed. by Shawn Lay. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Pp. 230. ISBN 0-252-01832-X.

Between Convergence and Exceptionalism: Americans and the British Model of Labor Relations, c. 1867–1920

32.50. ‘We are all leaders’: the alternative unionism of the early 1930s . Ed. by Staughton Lynd. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Pp. 343. ISBN 0-252-02243-2.

'If the workers took a notion': the right to strike and American political development - Josiah B. Lambert

44.95 Paperback 0-252-06547-6.

The right to manage : industrial relations policies of American business in the 1940s

17.95. Stalins famine and Roosevelts recognition of Russia . By M. Wayne Morris. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994. Pp. ix+224. ISBN 0-8191-9379-8.

The right to manage : industrial relations policies of American business in the 1940s.

34.50. Building a democratic political order: reshaping American liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s . By David Plotke. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xi+388. ISBN 0-521-42059-8. £40.00. Forging new freedoms; nativism, education, and the constitution, 1917–1927 . By William G. Ross. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pp. x+277. ISBN 0-8032-3900-9.

Conquering winter : US consumers and the cast-iron stove

35. Liberals and communism: the ‘red decade’ revisited . By Frank A. Warren. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; originally published 1966. Pp. xxiii+276. ISBN 0-231-08444-7.

The Master Craftsman.

45.00. Paperback 0-231-08445-5.