Mulligan, Jr., William H.

Dr. William H. Mulligan, Jr., is Professor of History at Murray State University in Kentucky, teaching courses in American social history, early American history, and the history of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora. He earned his Ph.D. at Clark University. Dr. Mulligan has published a number of books and articles on American industrial and social history and most recently on Irish immigrant copper miners in Upper Michigan. From 1993 to 2004, he was director of the Forrest C. Pogue Public History Institute at Murray State. He is a past president of the Michigan Archival Association and Kentucky Association of Museums.

Shoemakers of Lynn, Massachusetts, 1850-1880

2006 0-7734-5586-8
This study looks closely at the lives of shoemakers in Lynn, Massachusetts during the period when their work was mechanized and moved into factories. For many decades prior to the 1850s, Lynn had been a major center for the manufacture of shoes, all made by hand through a putting-out system. Men and women each had a role to play in making shoes. The family was the center of production and shoemaking shaped many aspects of family life, including fertility. Beginning in 1851, a series of machines replaced handwork and work moved from the home and near-by workshops to factories. By 1880, the old system was all but extinct and a large number of machines replaced the hand skills of Lynn’s cordwainers and binders. This change in both the nature and location of work affected family life in a number of ways, including choice of marriage partner, fertility and the role of the family in providing job training. This work explores both pre-industrial and industrial Lynn and analyzes the relationship between work and family life and how changes in work changed family life. It will appeal to those interested in the social history of industrialization, the history of the family, and demographic history.