Industrial Age

World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work.

The crisis of the progressive movement is so evident that nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of its basic assumptions is required. Today's progressives now work for professional organizations more comfortable with the inside game in Washington, DC (and capitols throughout the West), where they are outmatched and outspent by corporate interests. In No Shortcuts, Jane McAlevey argues that progressives can win, but lack the organized power to enact significant change, to outlast their bosses in labor fights, and to hold elected leaders accountable.

For most of human existence, people lived in a somewhat similar fashion. Everything that has been produced, from food and raw materials to clothing and other finished products, has been done either solely by hand or with some help of animal power. This was the same across the eras and throughout the world, no matter how advanced or backward the various civilizations were. Yet, our lives today couldn’t be more different.

Author Jeremy Rifkin presents an insider's account of the next great economic era: the Third Industrial Revolution, when a new ethic of sustainability will revolutionize the world we live in.

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society’s members.

In the past few years, online crowdworking platforms - like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Clickworker - have become an increasingly important source of work, particularly for those in the Global South. Here, small tasks are assigned to people online, and are often used to train algorithms to spot patterns, patterns through machine learning those same algorithms will then be able to spot more effectively than humans. Used for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the digital economy.

In an era when people live longer and want (or need) to work past the traditional retirement age, the Vita Needle Company of Needham, Massachusetts, provides inspiration and important lessons about the value of older workers. Vita Needle is a family-owned factory that was founded in 1932 and makes needles, stainless steel tubing and pipes, and custom fabricated parts. As part of its unusual business model, the company seeks out older workers; the median age of the employees is seventy-four.

In American history, the prevailing narratives of the tumultuous late-nineteenth century focus on wealthy individuals and tycoons while downplaying the very high social and economic stresses they caused. The Age of Discontent reveals that it was not the tycoons, but rather the laborers and farmers, who in a great uprising of popular democracy reinvented the nation for the emerging industrial world never imagined by the Founders.

We are currently transitioning from the industrial age to the social age, where technology is getting more advanced by the day, both augmenting and, in some cases, replacing humans. This shift can either boost you and your business or cause you to disappear. Discover what individuals and businesses need to do to survive and succeed during this transition.

On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a Chicago labor rally, wounding dozens of policemen, seven of whom eventually died. A wave of mass hysteria swept the country, leading to a sensational trial that culminated in four controversial executions and dealt a blow to the labor movement from which it would take decades to recover. Historian James Green recounts the rise of the first great labor movement in the wake of the Civil War and brings to life an epic 20-year struggle for the eight-hour workday.

From the suburban sprawl of 1960s Bloomington, Minnesota, to a stereotypical family farm in western Illinois, to a mid-sized enclave of oil and rusted iron in Ohio, the life journey of Mike Pickett ambles through the last gasp of the Industrial Age and into a digitized world where we imagine ourselves to be different from the thousands of generations that preceded us.

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, then this two-in-one books bundle is for you. Includes: Age of Enlightenment and The Industrial Revolution.

Jamie Merisotis, author of the award-winning 2016 book America Needs Talent, argues that people will coexist with smart machines by learning, earning, and serving others over their lifetimes. But Merisotis asserts large-scale change is necessary to develop and hone the knowledge, skills, and abilities that render us uniquely human. These qualities include compassion, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and interpersonal communication.

For two and a half centuries, America has been held together by the belief that if you work hard and conduct yourself responsibly in this country, you will be able to prosper and leave a better life for your children. But over the past decade, that idea has come into crisis. In this story-driven manifesto on the future of American work, author Jay Richards argues that such thinking is counterproductive - making us more fragile, more dependent, and less equipped to succeed in a rapidly changing economy.

The dramatic story of the explosive 1894 clash of industry, labor, and government that shook the nation and marked a turning point for America. The Edge of Anarchy offers a vivid account of the greatest uprising of working people in American history. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine threatened, riots broke out along the rail lines. Soon the US Army was on the march and gunfire rang from the streets of major cities.

In current debates about globalization, open and borderless elites are often set in opposition to the immobile and protectionist working classes. This view obscures a major historical fact: for around a century—from the 1860s to the 1970s—worker movements were at the cutting edge of internationalism. The creation in London of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 was a turning point. In this urgent, engaging work, historian Nicolas Delalande explores how international worker solidarity developed.

For the captains of industry ? men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Henry Ford ? the Gilded Age is a time of big money. Technology boomed with the invention of trains, telephones, electric lights, harvesters, vacuum cleaners, and more. But for millions of immigrant workers, it is a time of big struggles, with adults and children alike working 12 to 14 hours a day under extreme, dangerous conditions.

Descubra los acontecimientos históricos más importantes de la historia europea moderna, como la Revolución Industrial y la Revolución francesa, la Primera y la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el Holocausto, la Gran Depresión, el movimiento por el sufragio femenino, la Guerra Fría y mucho más. Desde las revoluciones hasta las guerras, la historia cobra vida con datos divertidos, imágenes y mapas fascinantes. Además, pondrá a prueba sus conocimientos con atractivas actividades. Tampoco debe preocuparse por las palabras más complicadas.

Discover the most important historical events in modern European history, such as the Industrial and French Revolutions, the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, the Great Depression, the women’s suffrage movement, the Cold War, and so much more.