They Worked Regular ─ Craft, Labor, And Family in the Industrial Community of Virginius Island

Taking an island in the Shenandoah River adjacent to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia as a case study, anthropologists Palus (Columbia U.) and Shackel (U. of Maryland-College Park) argue that as industrial management techniques shifted from strong paternalistic controls in the early to middle 19th century to absentee forms of ownership in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the workforce became increasingly de-skilled, leading to the impoverishment of working-class people and the homogenization of everyday material culture. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Matthew Palus is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He specializes in historical archaeology, public utilities and infrastructure, modernization, planning, critical theory, and labor history. Paul A. Shackel is the director of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland. He also worked for the National Park Service for seven and a half years. He is the author of Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American Industrial Era and Archaeology and Created Memory: Public History in a National Park.