We Are What We Make: History of Factories

Joshua B. Freeman doesn't chronicle the aftershocks of the loss of five million factory jobs from the American landscape or show you the impact of disappearing factory jobs on towns across America. And I wish he had addressed the abandoned plants, escalating drug crime and crowded food pantries.

But what this distinguished professor of history at CUNY's Queens College does is lay out two centuries of factory production all over the world in ways that are accessible, cogent, occasionally riveting and thoroughly new. The history of large factories, as Freeman outlines it, is the history of the modern world and most everything we see, experience and touch.