Staff Profile

Professor Howell John Harris

Professor in the Department of History

Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 41065

His research encompasses the business, economic, labour and technological history of the USA, pursued through closely-focused interdisciplinary case studies. His current work focuses on how American inventors, manufacturers, and consumers coped with the problems of exceptionally severe winters in the early 19th century, at a time of growing expectations of comfort and convenience in everyday life. With the opportunities presented by abundant coal deposits and improved transport systems, new technologies for heating and cooking were developed, on which 19th century-domesticity would depend. This led to the rise of a major manufacturing industry.

Research Interests

History of technology, esp. 19th-century metalworking
American cast-iron stoves and stovemaking
Labour and business in U.S. history

Publications

Books: authored

2000 Bloodless Victories: The Rise and Fall of the Open Shop in the Philadelphia Metal Trades, 1890-1940, Cambridge University Press, xviii + 465 pp.
1982 The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s, University of Wisconsin Press, ix, 296 pp.

Essays in edited volumes

2003 'Industrial paternalism and welfare capitalism: 'where's the beef?' or 'show me the money!'', in R. Baritono, D. Frezza, A. Lorini, M. Vaudagna & E. Vezzosi (eds.), Public and Private in American History State, Family, Subjectivity in the Twentieth Century, Otto Editore, pp. 459-482
2002 'Industrial history: the state of the art', in Melvyn Stokes (ed.), The State of U.S. History, Berg, pp. 179-197
2002 'The spatial mobility of ordinary people: a civil-war era case', in Cornelis A. van Minnen & Sylvia Hilton (eds.), Nation on the Move: Mobility in U.S. History, VU University Press, pp. 111-128
1999 'War in the social order: the Great War and the liberalization of American Quakerism', in David K. Adams & Cornelius A. van Minnen (eds.), Religious and Secular Reform in America: Ideas, Beliefs, and Social Change, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 179-203
1993 'Industrial democracy and liberal capitalism, ca. 1890-1920', in N.N. Lichtenstein, & H.J. Harris (eds.), Industrial Democracy: The Ambiguous Promise, Cambridge University Press, pp. 43-66
1991 'Employers' collective action in the open-shop era: the Metal Manufacturers' Association of Philadelphia, c. 1903-1933', in S. Tolliday & J. Zeitlin (eds.), The Power to Manage? Employers and Industrial Relations in Comparative-Historical Perspective, Routledge, pp. 117-146
1990 'Getting it together: the Metal Manufacturers' Association of Philadelphia, ca. 1990-1930', in S.M. Jacoby (ed.), Masters to Managers: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers, Columbia University Press, pp. 111-131, 222-224
1985 'The snares of liberalism? Politicians, bureaucrats, and the shaping of federal labor relations policy, ca.1915-1947', in S. Tolliday & J. Zeitlin (eds.), Shop Floor Bargaining and the state: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, pp. 148-191

Journal papers: academic

2009 ''The Stove Trade Needs Change Continually': Designing the First Mass-Market Consumer Durable, ca. 1810-1930', Winterthur Portfolio 43, pp. 365-406
2008 'Conquering winter: U.S. consumers and the cast-iron stove', Building Research and Information 36, pp. 337-350
2008 'Inventing the U.S. stove industry, c. 1815-1875: making and selling the first universal consumer durable', Business History Review 82, pp. 701-733
2007 'Between convergence and exceptionalism: Americans and the British model of labor relations, c. 1867-1920', Labor History 48, pp. 141-173
2000 'The rocky road to mass production: change and continuity in the US foundry industry, 1890-1940', Enterprise and Society 1, pp. 391-437
1999 'Interwar American histories: left, right, and wrong', Historical Journal 42, pp. 293-308
1993 'Durable goods: steelworkers in America after three decades', Labor History 34, pp. 479-489
1989 'The Master Craftsman', Labor History 30, pp. 93-106

Teaching Areas

US history in the 19th and 20th centuries, esp business, international relations and wars